THE OLDEST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Sundance FF 2026) – Review by Leslie Combemale
It makes sense that everyone around the world becomes fascinated by growing old, and longevity. We are all meant to age and, if extremely lucky, stay healthy until we die at a ripe old age. Of course, that’s often not true, but as we don’t any of us have a working crystal ball, we can only hope for the best, while watching the oldest of the old and try to decipher their secrets.
That’s what documentarian Sam Green determined to do with The Oldest Person in the World. It’s part of a larger project he started in 2015 in which he plans to document the coming and going of the oldest people in the world for decades, with this film meant to be part one, the first of many. Audiences are introduced to six different Guinness record holders, who maintain their record for anywhere between months and several years. What is most striking about this diverse collection of people, all of whom have lived to be far older than 100, is how engaged or disconnected to the world around them they are. None seem to be suffering with dementia. In fact, 116 year old Violet Brown recites a 3-minute poem she’d learned over a hundred years ago. Susannah Mushatt Jones spends most of her time asleep. It’s amazing to see another nearly 120 year old walk with just the use of a cane. I know several less spry 70 year olds.
What raises this documentary above one in which these seemingly ageless miracles are merely chronicled in objective fashion is Sam Green’s examination of his own life and loss. His insights about the brother he lost to suicide years before embarking on the project along with a serious personal health struggle that might cut his own life short and the birth and growth of his son Atlas all show the preciousness of every moment, and how little any of us can take a long life for granted. It is the specificity of his personal experience that brings home the universality of our shared desire to “live long and prosper”.
There have been other films that document the lives of the world’s oldest people, but those are more about cracking the secret of how they’ve survived for so long. In the philosophical considerations around his own fragility, and the persistent sadness of his loss, Green reframes the worldwide fascination with the oldest people in the world into something deeply personal. How he, or, as he hopes, his descendants will continue to do that in subsequent films of the series remains to be seen.
4 out of 5 stars.
