For nearly fifty years, Robb Moss’s films have toggled between the topical and the personal. AFRICA REVISITED, SECRECY, and CONTAINMENT explore racial complexity, government secrecy and nuclear waste, while Riverdogs, The Tourist, THE SAME RIVER TWICE and THE BEND IN THE RIVER explore youthful extravagance, infertility and adoption, and the move from youth to middle age and beyond. His films have premiered at Sundance and Telluride, reviewed in the New York and Los Angeles Times, nominated for an Independent Spirit award. He has taught filmmaking at Harvard University, Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies for the past five decades.
Since Barry Wasserman’s youth, he’s always been painfully interested in mortality, but even with his early awareness of the inevitable, Barry has never stopped living. He runs rivers, gets married, has children, becomes Mayor of Placerville, California, runs for office again, and loses. When he retires at 65—as the director of a mental health facility—Barry is toasted by his teary and grateful daughter for leaving his river-life and working a stable job to support her. Even when life deals him the blows of cancer and divorce, he faces them head on, refusing to harden. His openness to the tender vulnerability of life’s unexpected trials makes him a good person to talk to. Today, at 77 years-old, with a new wife, Barry’s driveway has become a regular stop for a man with Alzheimer’s who sometimes needs Barry’s help to find his way home again.
