It’s been nearly 50 years since director Robb Moss first documented his month-long trip through the Grand Canyon with five friends. That footage became the 1978 documentary “Riverdogs” and served as the jumping off point for its appropriately titled 2003 follow-up, “The Same River Twice.” In 2026, Moss returns to Colorado a third time with the same quintet to document their winding lives in the interim.
There’s a simplicity to the enormous scope of “A Bend in the River.” Although it compiles footage spread across five decades, it feels like a gentle check-in, a phone call to an old pal that runs unexpectantly, pleasantly long. It meanders on occasion, but this is fitting for a doc with so many shots filmed from dinghies on the Colorado River.
Moss reintroduces his friends one by one. There’s the uptight, twice-married Barry, the free-spirited dance teacher Danny, the on-again, off-again couple Cathy and Jeff, and the shamanic recluse Jim, who appears to have left some part of himself on the riverbank. The group has largely drifted apart in the process of aging, and — save for Jim, whose life revolves around his bittersweet connection to nature — they’ve all married, had kids (in some cases, even grandkids) and gotten nine-to-five jobs.
There’s a simplicity to the enormous scope of “A Bend in the River.”
The film flows smoothly between the decades, presenting subjects through footage from the three movies in quick succession. The different era’s mediums — grainy 16mm film stock, rudimentary DV video, modern HD video — serve to quickly differentiate the decades, allowing Moss to edit together the footage intuitively, without the need to slow down and reestablish time and place. However, as much as the passage of time is captured textually, it’s also reflected thematically, through Moss’s evolving framing and fixations.
The 1970s footage from the first film, “Riverdogs,” shows the group shedding their clothes and communing with nature in primal fashion. The flashback scenes are youthful and energetic — at once a sociological and anatomical study. “The Same River Twice” is a reality check on that sense of infinite possibility, more interested in people’s faces as they admit to mistakes and regrets. When the popular, attractive Jeff admits to cheating on his partner Cathy, it refocuses Moss’s study towards the unforeseen ripple effects of living with no care for consequence. It is, in a way, a first step to maturing dramatically.
On the surface, the newly shot segments feel mundane by comparison. However, the camera’s focus on quiet minutiae of life during twilight years — countertops, dusty piles of books and other domestic details — hints at a gentler and more learned point of view, as the subjects look back on their lives with wisdom and contentment. There are younger characters — the friends’ own children, a new generation of river guides and Barry’s grandchild, who adorably knocks over the camera to provide the film’s only glimpse of Moss. These youngsters press their elders for insight about the river’s changing face, about how people once saw the world and how that perspective has shifted over time, leading to the looming ecological disasters that some of the group have resisted as activists. As much as “A Bend in the River” is about their connections to one another, it’s also about our connection to Earth and to waters that run at turns violent and calm, not unlike the flow of life.
The post Down By the Riverside appeared first on Truthdig .