In 1978 as the Age of Aquarius neared exhaustion after a decade-long overdose of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, a group of seventeen friends decided to take one last trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. For 35 days they lived communally, discarded their clothes, shared some drugs and each other, and created a great memory.

One of the seventeen who made the trip was future documentary filmmaker Rob Moss, who used his new 16mm movie camera to record the experience.

Moss did not return to the river again until 2000. He said he realized how much he and the world had changed since that trip of twenty years earlier, and how much a part of him yearned for those simpler joys –and truths—of his youth. He wondered if others in the group felt the same, so he decided to track down several friends who had participated on the earlier trip and to document what their lives were like now. The results became “The Same River Twice,” an 80-minute documentary that became the darling of the Sundance Film Festival in 2003. Moss acted as producer, director and cinematographer.

Although the film is in the same “then vs. now” genre as The Big Chill and The Return of the Secaucus Seven, Moss tries mightily to make the “now” part far more interesting than just a bunch of “talking heads” wistfully remembering their past.

Shot over a four-year period, Moss narrowed his focus to follow the lives of just five of the former “River Rats” because “they represented the personalities and types of everyone else that was there.” Surprisingly, all five of the people profiled seem to have clung to their ideals and found work that does service to their communities. One, for example, is an author of environmental books, another is an elementary school teacher, and a third has been mayor of her small town for nine years. A fourth is seen undergoing radiation treatment for cancer, while the fifth has remained a river tour guide all these years and happily lives in a small trailer with his vegetable gardens and fruit trees. All are different, and yet all remain the same as they have always been. As a result the film when seen as a whole acts a powerful yet contemplative vision of how social pressure, time and our physical beings inflect our choices and shape our lives. These five characters collectively seem to represent the sum of Moss’s own sense of value and of loss innocence. That the 1978 river trip represented one of the highlights of everyone’s life is certain, although they didn’t know it at the time.

The river becomes yet another character in the film too, symbolizing the every-flowing passage of time with its swift currents and quiet pools.

Contemplating his life, one of the five says at the end of the film: “My father was once a kid, and then he was a father. Then he turned old, and then he died. If I am lucky I will become old someday also…when I look at people in their 20’s I am not jealous –well not really—it is just their turn to be young. If they’re lucky they will have a turn at middle age, and if they are really lucky they will also grow old. But we each get only one turn at each.”

The nudity is filmed in a positive manner, without the hint of sexual innuendo, but just as good playful fun without the hint of self-consciousness. One of the women profiled says while watching herself in the older footage, “When I see [us naked] it all seems so perfectly natural…Why did we do it? Because we could…” The Same River Twice represents a thoughtful and personal impression of a segment of the American baby-boomers not often seen in film: those who held to their youthful ideals and put them to work in their local communities.

The Same River Twice represents a thoughtful and personal impression of a segment of American baby-boomers not often seen in film: those who held to their youthful ideals and put them to work in their local communities. I hope the message gets distributed widely.

Note: The DVD version contains commentary by Director Robb Moss, a theatrical trailer, and a Q&A session with the director about the film at Harvard University. Sadly there are no subtitles available for the hearing impaired.