The third installment of what the filmmaker calls an “accidental trilogy” catches up with a cohort of friends confronting the challenges of their 70s while reflecting upon the winding pathways of their lives. The film interpolates and interrogates footage from two previous installments—Riverdogs (1978), a 16mm accounting of Moss and friends’ outdoor, rent-free life on the Colorado River, and The Same River Twice (2003), in which the friends reckoned with their move from being young and naked to clothed and middle-aged—offering an elegant and profoundly emotional journey of experiences accumulated, selves lost and found, and perspectives endured and achieved. Though Moss mostly remains off-screen, his evident closeness with the on-screen subjects is defining of an open and unendingly inquisitive cinematic practice, culminating—for now—with this magisterial construction from nearly 50 years of conversations, candid moments, and trips down the river.
The Bend in the River
The Bend in the River
Q&A with filmmaker Robb Moss
Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers), $13 (students)
SPECIAL EVENTS
Q&A with filmmaker Rob Moss
Tuesday, Aug. 11 2026, 7:00
- Robb Moss’ most recent film, The Bend in the River, premiered at the 2025 Telluride Film Festival. The film, the third of a trilogy, follows the lives of five friends from their twenties into the seventies, a meditation on time, friendship and the arc of lived lives. His films toggle between the topical and the personal. Africa Revisited (1981), Secrecy (2008), and Containment (2017) explore racial complexity, government secrecy and nuclear waste, while Riverdogs (1978), The Tourist (1991) and The Same River Twice (2003), explore youthful extravagance, infertility/adoption, and the move from youth to middle age. His films have premiered twice at both the Sundance and Telluride Film Festivals, exhibited at Lincoln Center, MoMA, reviewed in the New York and Los Angeles Times, nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and shown theatrically in more than seventy Landmark Cinemas. Moss’s work has also been shown in festivals and museums in Lebanon, Germany, Turkey, Austria, England, Iran, Amsterdam, Brazil, Korea, Australia, France, and Israel. He has been a creative advisor at the Sundance Institute’s Doc Edit Labs since their inception in 2004, worked as a festival juror at Sundance, San Francisco, Denver, Camden, Seattle, Chicago, New England, and Ann Arbor, elected to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, served eight years as a Board Director for ITVS, and taught filmmaking at Harvard University for the past 40 years where he is a former chair and current Professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies.
Tickets: $13 (members), $18 (nonmembers), $13 (students)
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