‘The Bend In The River’ Trailer: In Robb Moss Oscar Contender, Friends Reunite For Possibly Final Journey Down The Colorado

EXCLUSIVE: One of the most acclaimed documentaries of the year – nearly 50 years in the making – arrives on Netflix December 4.

The Bend in the River, the Oscar-contending film directed by Robb Moss, marks the culmination of a cinematic project that began in the late 1970s with Riverdogs, which documented a rafting trip that Moss took with his friends down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Those friends were in their 20s at the time, carefree and often clothing-free as they enjoyed life with the vitality and insouciance of youth. Moss documented another rafting trip with those friends in 2003’s The Same River Twice, his chums then in middle age. The new film finds the group rafting again, as river currents and the progress of time draw them closer to old age.

Watch the trailer for the film above.

“The film interweaves moments from the distant past with those of the recent present,” notes a release, “taking viewers back-and-forth through time and inviting personal reflections on the inexorable flow of aging and the unfinished project of living.”

In addition to his work as a filmmaker, Moss has taught film at Harvard University for over 30 years. Among his former students: Lance Oppenheim (You Can See Everything), two-time Oscar nominee Joshua Oppenheimer, Oscar nominees Yance Ford, RaMell Ross, and multiple Emmy nominee and Sundance Film Festival award winner Lauren Greenfield.

Some extraordinary collaborators worked with Moss on The Bend in the River, including producers Lisa Remington (Oscar winner for The Only Girl in the Orchestra) and Kristin Feeley, director of the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film and Artist Programs. The film’s executive producers include Oscar winners Frances McDormand and Joel Coen as well as Oscar-winning producers Shane Boris (Navalny) and Jeff Reichert (American Factory).

Moss received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2026 Woods Hole Film Festival in Massachusetts. The Bend in the River earned the Artistic Vision Award at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival in Montana and it won two awards at DOC LA, including Best Documentary and Best Editing, the latter award recognizing the work of Jeff Malmberg. It is set to screen at DOC NYC on November 12 after making that festival’s shortlist of the year’s best feature documentaries (DOC NYC calls it “a masterful meditation on the eternal, the temporal and the inevitable.”).

The Bend in the River screened at the 2025 edition of Doc Stories in San Francisco. At a Q&A there, Moss spoke about his approach to the filmmaking.

“It’s not really built out of biography, ‘This happened and that happened,’” Moss said. “People had extraordinary lives, biographically, that aren’t in the film. And it seemed when there were scenes like that that had too much biography, it’s like the film flattened. But the whole thing had to move more… the dynamic of something going downstream. It just had to keep bouncing forward even as it went backwards and forwards. The beginning of the piece had to be very clear what we were up to, that there were going to be multiple timeframes. [But] there’s no saying there’s multiple films, there’s no saying there’s multiple timeframes, there’s no dates, timestamps, there’s no voiceover, there’s no music to cover up cuts.”

Watch the trailer for The Bend in the River above.