I’ve been thinking lately about what affects people’s destiny. There were seven of us freshmen friends at Whitman College. As an only child, I felt like I finally had sisters. But after that year we each veered off into different futures. If we could have chosen – like if we had been given white cards, each with one of the futures that would befall us with both the tragedy and the success – would we choose our own? Would we even recognize our own?
In this way, Robb Moss, documentary filmmaker and chair of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, has revisited the gang who helped define him in 1978. He was the camera guy. He documented with film his tight group of friends who cavorted freely at the Colorado River’s edge, eating and playing communally amidst guiding white water canoe and kayak trips. You see one guy careening solo in the rough water full of boulders in his kayak. He turns upside down and, a while later, still in his kayak, uprights past the rocks, still alive and shooting further down the river.
The ensemble has no cares. They have left their jobs to attain this communal co-existence as river guides in the Grand Canyon Wilderness. One guy dives off a boulder into the rushing water, a gal free-climbs up a steep rock face into a cave with a deep pit. Both have shed clothes, like the rest in the group, to be totally unencumbered by modesty or societal norms. They just want to be completely free.
Then the cameraman, Moss, revisits these friends in 2003 and 2025. Have they remained in their free society outside of the strictures of societal expectations, or did they return where they left off, to dissatisfying authoritarian lives? Or still, have they reinvented themselves?
Moss’s cinema verité makes little personal comment. He juxtaposes interviews from the past with today, though he is challenged about what he can include by the participants, who eventually acquiesce to what we assume is Moss’s honest record of their lives.
Let me first point out that every one of them, including their eventual offspring, is exceptionally good-looking. In the early film clips, they are all lean, exhibiting energy and joy. There is music, eating, and repeated rafting down the river. It’s drenched in positivity – no conflicts are documented, though there is regret by someone about his adultery.
Unencumbered by a dress code, only the weather dictating their apparel, they stay clean, bathing and shampooing by the riverside. They use sunscreen. They have a leader. They move from place to place. Their only job is their joy, maneuvering down the river. Each day is marked by being alive and being free to do as they want.
After time passes, who stays next to nature? Who becomes a state senator? Who embraces a return to work? What does the geneticist who was working on cancer research end up doing? Who ends up happy?
Like my college friends, who could have predicted the destiny of each person in these early, carefree days? And what factors would influence the predictors and the outcome? Would I have preferred a destiny not my own? Does life end up fair? And finally, if happiness, like John Lennon said everyone wants, is a goal, who gets it and to what degree… and what truly contributes to some being happier than others?
Credits
Director: Robb Moss
Executive Producers: Joel Coen and Frances McDormand. Including James Costa, Tot Long, David Lewis, Shane Boris, Jeff Reichert, Shane Boris, Geralyn Whie Dreyfous, Regina K. Scully, Trvor Burgess
Producer: Kristin Feeley,
Cinematographer: Robb Moss
Editing: Jeff Malmberg, ACE, with Mona Davis as co-editor
Cast: not published
Release: US premiere on Aug. 14, 2026 at Film Forum
Official Website: https://www.thebendintheriver.com/
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