Director Robb Moss will be in a post-film Close Up conversation with filmmaker (and former student) Cecilia Aldarondo after the Saturday, Sept. 26, 4:30 pm screening
Riverdogs In 1978, Robb Moss was 28 years old, a former river guide in the Mountain West and dreaming of a career as a filmmaker. One fall, on a month-long Grand Canyon rafting adventure with a group of friends, he collected the footage that would form the basis for his first film, the now-celebrated Riverdogs, a glorious sun-drenched ode to youth and nature, to life lived, often without clothing, at the brink of the possible. Shot on 16mm, scenes of communal play and risky outdoor adventuring are stacked one upon another creating a portrait of joy, vigor, and freedom. At the end of the trip, the group convened a vote: should they all stay together or head home? While they didn’t know it, they were on the verge of no longer being young. (dir. Robb Moss, U.S., 1978, 32 min.)
The Same River Twice In the 1970s, Robb Moss worked as a guide along the Colorado River, living an idyllic (often naked) existence with friends. The breathtaking Grand Canyon is the setting for Moss’ utopian record of what it’s like to be in one’s 20s, in robust health, surrounded by friends and lovers. Cut to several decades later: Moss works at Harvard; his friends are married (and divorced), raising children, caring for elderly parents, and feeling the weight of their transformation into fully-dressed, middle-class, middle-aged people. It makes for a piercingly poignant and compelling look at the ways the present gradually overtakes the past. (dir. Robb Moss, U.S., 2003, 78 min.)
“A beguiling, lyrical portrait of idealism and adulthood.” –New York
All five characters are revisited over 20 years later in Robb Moss’ most recent film, The Bend in the River, concluding his “river film” trilogy, at Upstate Films Sept. 25, 26, 27, 29 and Oct. 1
For nearly fifty years, Robb Moss’ films have toggled 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), The Same River Twice (2003) and The Bend in the River (2025) explore youthful extravagance, infertility and adoption, and the move from youth to middle age and beyond. His films have premiered at Sundance and Telluride, been reviewed in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, nominated for an Independent Spirit award, and shown theatrically in more than seventy Landmark Cinemas. Moss’ 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 five decades where he is a Professor in the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies.