The Oldest Person in the World Review: Sam Green's Soft and Gentle Documentary Gives the Gift of Immortality

Documentarian Sam Green has an obsession he can't quite explain: learning about the oldest living person in the world. It's a Guinness Book of World Records title that stands apart from others in that the holder rarely keeps it for very long. Old people die, even ones who live to 122 years old, as in the case of Jeanne Calment, to this day the oldest person to ever live, who chain-smoked until the day she died in 1999, in Toulon, France.

For the last ten years, Green has dutifully traveled around the world to meet with the current record holder, as verified by Guinness. At the same time, he has documented his own wrestling with questions of mortality while raising a son in Brooklyn, New York. The Oldest Person in the World is a soft and gentle hug of a film, one that reifies life's most sacred values while retaining the essential mystery behind our most pressing questions.

The Oldest Person in the World Answers Existential Questions Previously Unanswerable

Green likes to make movies about massive existential questions. His approach is that of an armchair philosopher. 32 Sounds was a film about, well, sound. He asks questions in The Oldest Person in the World that we all ask, except most of us don't expect an answer. Why are we concerned about longevity? Is it better to live long or live well, and is it possible to do both? What is it about our collective fascination with immortality?

His latest documentary is delivered straight from his beating heart via a consistent voiceover that would be comfortably at home behind an NPR mic. It lilts up and lingers on final consonants, like he's savoring his own thoughts as they come. In the film, he becomes something of an ambassador to aging, which, as it turns out, is an ironic position to be in: Green is a survivor of multiple myeloma, a cancer which afflicts the blood plasma of the bone marrow, and he is a survivor of suicide. His brother died by it, in 2009.

Since Green can never predict how long the current record holder will keep their title, the film has taken ten years to shoot. And, in between his visits with the supercentenarians, he muses on the uncertainty of his own lifespan as a contrast to the brand-new life he's ushering in through his son, Atlas. Green imagines that his film could take on a life of its own. At its current state as programmed for Sundance 2026, the film runs 87 minutes; but the documentarian hopes to continuously add profiles of the next oldest living person to the film, making it a living document of the deceased.

And that's where The Oldest Living Person in the World is at its most magical. Cinema is a tool of immortality. It allows people to live on in perpetuity, so long as the film (or digital copy) is extant. Photographs retain their time and place; cinema moves and breathes. Any person is ephemeral, but especially those whose existence is most under the microscope when considered only for the fact of their unlikely stay on this earth. What Green has done is to peel back the layers which shroud these people, immortalizing them beyond their brief occupation on the throne of the oldest living person in the world.

Amongst those he immortalizes: Emma Morano, 117, an Italian woman whose secret to long life was to swear off men and eat three raw eggs a day. Violet Brown, also 117, of Jamaica, whose secret was that, what she "catches," she "holds," a reference to Lord Byron's poem "Vision of Belshazzar," where we get the phrase "your days are numbered." Kane Tanaka, of Japan, 119, who solves math problems to exercise her brain. There's Sister André, a French nun, whose last days fittingly saw her head permanently bent up to the heavens.

And Maria Branyas, 117 years old and 168 days when she died, who says there's nothing special about what's happened to her. "A century is a century," she nonachalantly suggests. And her advice:

"You are so young.

And now is the time.

To do good works."

A little impromptu accidental poem from the world's oldest person, in August 2024. Green does indeed do good work here. Good work to remind us that life is mostly made up of little things. Like petting a turtle, or learning violin. It may be simple, but it is true. Just as true as one old woman who, in response to what has let her live so long, simply says: "good health." May we all have it.

The Oldest Person in the World screened at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

Release Date January 23, 2026

Runtime 87 minutes

Director Sam Green

Producers Josh Penn, Julie Parker Benello, Nina Sing Fialkow, Alex Turtletaub, Jenifer Westphal, Roman Nesis, Alison Byrne Fields, Marni E.J. Grossman