‘The Bend In The River’ Trailer: In Robb Moss Oscar Contender, Friends Reunite For Possibly Final Journey Down The Colorado — SkimNews
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- The Bend in the River arrives on Netflix on December 4, completing a cinematic project Robb Moss began in the late 1970s with Riverdogs — nearly 50 years in the making.
- Robb Moss documented his friends' rafting trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in Riverdogs in the late 1970s, returned with the same group for The Same River Twice in 2003, and filmed them on the river again for the new film as river currents and the progress of time draw them closer to old age.
- Robb Moss said at a Q&A after the film's 2025 Doc Stories screening in San Francisco that it is "not really built out of biography" and uses no dates, timestamps, voiceover or music to cover cuts, because overly biographical scenes "flattened" the work.
- DOC LA honored the film with two awards — Best Documentary and Best Editing, the latter recognizing Jeff Malmberg's work — while it took the Artistic Vision Award at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Montana.
- DOC NYC shortlisted The Bend in the River among the year's best feature documentaries and scheduled a November 12 screening, calling it "a masterful meditation on the eternal, the temporal and the inevitable."
- Frances McDormand and Joel Coen served as executive producers alongside Oscar-winning producers Shane Boris and Jeff Reichert; Lisa Remington, an Oscar winner for The Only Girl in the Orchestra, and Sundance Institute's Kristin Feeley produced.
- Harvard University is where Moss has taught film for more than 30 years; his former students include two-time Oscar nominee Joshua Oppenheimer, Oscar nominees Yance Ford and RaMell Ross, and Sundance award winner Lauren Greenfield.
Why it matters: With Oscar winners Frances McDormand and Joel Coen as executive producers and DOC LA's Best Documentary already awarded, the December 4 Netflix launch carries Moss's 50-year project beyond the festival circuit — DOC NYC screens it November 12 — to a streaming audience.
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