What does it mean to be the oldest person in the world? That’s the question that filmmaker Sam Green wanted to answer as a way of indulging his interest in this particular subject, a record that is constantly changing as each person who holds it succumbs, later in life than most, to the eventuality that will come for us all. What he has put together to satiate that intrigue is an exploration of the many ways people act when they’re told that they’re older than any other living person and what that should indicate for the rest of us far from that point but who can still find plenty of time to appreciate what we have now and might have in the future.
Green begins his journey when he reads a profile of the oldest person in the world and realizes she lives just a few subway stops from him. He’s mystified, however, when her birthday celebration involves so much fanfare but the woman being feted is asleep the entire time. He later meets with other holders of the title, including a nun who doesn’t feel that she should necessarily live longer, a woman who can still recite a poem she memorized 110 years earlier, and another who still does math problems regularly to keep her mind sharp. Green often doesn’t know what to ask those who don’t speak much, and chastises himself when he’s forced to revert to what he calls the dumbest question in the world: what’s the secret to living so long?
Green, who has been at the Sundance Film Festival many times before, weaves his personal experience into this film. He describes the feeling of having a child at fifty years old and calculating that, when his son is fifty, he’ll be one hundred years old. He undergoes chemotherapy after an unexpected diagnosis, suddenly thinking about his own mortality, and revisits the death by suicide of his brother. He’s particularly sad about the fact that he has only one video of his brother, a relic of a time long before smartphones offered the ability to capture anything and everything without thinking twice. He hopes to gain some insight from these people who have lived well over one hundred years about what’s mattered most and what they hold most dear.
Watching this film is understandably difficult at times, mainly because everyone Green and audiences meet will be dead by the time the film is over. It’s not all melancholy, however, since there is humor to be found in how these people engage with a statistic that doesn’t really affect them personally even if it means something to the rest of the world. Green also includes someone who is the oldest person with a living parent, and the oldest group of siblings who all still go on Zoom daily to catch up. It’s also interesting to hear from the person who runs the Guinness Book of World Records, who doesn’t think he’ll ever reach such an old age because he values quality of life, declaring that he doesn’t want to go to the gym every day just to rack up a little extra time at the end.
There isn’t a specific conclusion or thesis offered when this film’s credits roll, which might frustrate some viewers but which speaks to the fact that Green has merely collected wisdom and captured people who have lived through a variety of things, including three centuries, in a number of cases. That the all-time record set by Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122, is still a full three years ahead of the second-oldest person, suggests that these statistics may not in fact have meaning. Regardless, this exploration of the longevity of life is very worthwhile and sure to provoke a reaction from anyone who watches it as they contemplate their own mortality and what they enjoy most about life.
Movie Rating: 8/10
The Oldest Person in the World premieres in the Premieres section at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
