JEANNE CALIMET OF FRANCE INTERVIEWED AT 121 IN 1996, ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE SHOWN IN THE OLDEST PERSON IN THER WORLD
Hanging in there
Sam Green has made a doc about longevity, and it takes him to Italy, Spain, Japan, and other places. It's a warm and friendly doc considering that the title of "oldest person in the world" (Green visits Guinness Book of Records headquarters) always ends, usually sooner rather than later, in the death of the titilist. Not surprisingly, because his approach is upbeat, the director ends with footage of his vibrant son Atlas, nimbly dancing, then ending, age around ten, with running briskly around a track and giving a thumbs-up. And though he has to take a drug to maintain health, Green is diagnosed with mylenoma during the decade he made the film, and survived. Harder to survive, is the suicide of his brother Dave, which also occurs in 2009.
So this is a very personal film, with some beauty, and some hard truth. In the foregrond there are interviews with the reigning titlists, who Green rushes to film as soon as the last one dies and the new one is declared. There is a lot of footwork here, and time put in.
A famous witticism is "Youth is wasted on the young." One can as well say that old age is wasted on the elderly, judging from these interviews. Some 117-year-olds manage wit, most not. A French lady when informed of her accomplishment quips, "I'd rather be the youngest." Fair enough. Some of the celebrants remain slumped in their chairs, and do not speak, or are hard to understand. It takes some effort to understand the Jamaican lady Violet Mosse-Brown, who likes to recite Lord Byron's "Vision of Belshazzar," a poem she memorized 100 years earlier. Maria Branyas posts regularly on Twitter, maintaining a toehold on the technological age. Susannah Mushatt Jones, oh the other hand, seems to require a handler, and sleeps through her own 116th birthday celebration. Another is tired of living at the post 115 stage, but speaks of hanging on to reach a record age.
It seems this works best as a pretext for the filmmaker to stay busy and think, learn, and talk about life and aging as the years of his filmmaking mount up. At the end, he proposes that, after filming on the subject for a decade, he might go on doing so for another decade, and longer. And then pass the job on to his son Atlas after that, to be passed on to Atlas' own son. As long as there is a focus on such a basic thing as growing old and the filmmaker keeps himself in the picture to make it personal, people will watch it. Green draws out attention to one of life's most basic subjects and has some enlightening and heartening things to say about it. The flow is a little jerky at times, and not everything said is profound.
One couldn't help remembering the saying associated with Bette Davis: "Old age ain't no place for sissies." It reflects a harder look at the subject than this film wants to take.
Sam Green previously made the documentary The Weather Underground (2002); The Universal Language (2011), about Esperanto; A Thousand Thoughts (2018) about the Kronos Quartet; and the immersive sonic journey 32 Sounds (2022).
The Oldsest Person in the World, 87 mins., premiered Jan. 23, 2026 at Sundance, showing also at Big Sky, True/False, Thessaloniki, SXSW, Copenhagen (CPH:DOX), and numerous other festivals. Limited US theatrical release Sept. 10, 2026. The film opens on that day at Angelika Film Center, NYC, followed by L.A. and the S.F. Bay Area openings Fri., Sept. 18, with a subsequent national expansion. Metacritic rating: 75%.