By John Corrado
The 2026 Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 23rd to May 3rd in Toronto
In his documentary The Oldest Person in the World, filmmaker Sam Green focuses on people who have lived for over a century. These are the world record holders for longest lifespan, with French woman Jeanne Calment holding the record at 122 years old when she died in 1997.
Spurred on by a childhood interest in the Guinness Book of World Records, Green sets out to find and interview the world’s oldest living people. In doing so, Green has crafted a film that manages to be both entertaining and deep, grappling with big philosophical questions about aging and the passage of time in a way that is by turns delightful and moving.
The challenge is that he isn’t guaranteed much time with any of these subject, with them passing the torch to the second-oldest when they pass away. It all starts with Susannah Mushatt Jones, the elderly Jamaican woman in Brooklyn, whose 116th birthday party he attended in 2015. It turned into a huge community celebration, with her ironically asleep at the centre of it.
Green interviews these subjects, asking them to look back on their lives, and that most notorious of questions that they get asked by everyone; what’s your secret? The answers range from drinking Coca-Cola every day according to Japan’s Kane Tanaka, to eating three raw eggs every day and avoiding men according to Emma Morano in Italy. In other words, maybe some people just get lucky being blessed with more time.
As heavy as this topic is, Green’s film also has plenty of moments of levity and light, a lot of which surprisingly comes from the elderly subjects themselves and the frankness of their responses to Green’s questions. There is real insight and wisdom in watching them speak to the camera, with one of the subjects even reciting a poem that she learned in school a century earlier. Any one of them could’ve easily had their own documentary.
What begins as Green simply documenting the oldest people in the world, turns into a much more sprawling, ambitious, and personal project. Elements of Green’s own life seep into the film due to unforeseen circumstances. This is all juxtaposed with the filmmaker following his own son Atlas, who was born during the production, during the first several years of his life. Green muses that, for a split second, his son was the youngest person in the world, coming into it just as his oldest subjects were leaving. The choice to include his son is a wise one, as seeing the young boy discover the world alongside scenes of the very elderly can be a profound experience.
Watching this decade-in-the-making film, which spans from 2015 to 2025, it’s impossible not to contemplate and think about our own lives over the past ten years. It was a decade, of course, that included a global pandemic right in the middle of it, forcing all of us to grapple with mortality in a very real and immediate way. In some ways, as deeply personal as the film is for Green, it also serves as something for us to project our own feelings onto.
Balancing being a sincere look at the subject of aging and longevity, with the filmmaker very much involving himself into the project, The Oldest Person in the World is always compelling to watch as it keeps introducing new ideas and themes. It’s a wonderful achievement, and such an ambitious undertaking that Green even discusses turning it into a version of Michael Apted’s Up series, with a new instalment every decade.
The Joy of Movies 