Documentarian Sam Inexperienced has an obsession he cannot fairly clarify: studying concerning the oldest dwelling particular person on the earth. It is a Guinness E book of World Information title that stands aside from others in that the holder not often retains it for very lengthy. Previous individuals die, even ones who stay to 122 years previous, as within the case of Jeanne Calment, to at the present time the oldest particular person to ever stay, who chain-smoked till the day she died in 1999, in Toulon, France.
For the final ten years, Inexperienced has dutifully traveled world wide to satisfy with the present file holder, as verified by Guinness. On the identical time, he has documented his personal wrestling with questions of mortality whereas elevating a son in Brooklyn, New York. The Oldest Particular person within the World is a smooth and delicate hug of a movie, one which reifies life’s most sacred values whereas retaining the important thriller behind our most urgent questions.
The Oldest Particular person within the World Solutions Existential Questions Beforehand Unanswerable
Inexperienced likes to make motion pictures about huge existential questions. His strategy is that of an armchair thinker. 32 Sounds was a movie about, effectively, sound. He asks questions in The Oldest Particular person within the World that all of us ask, besides most of us do not anticipate a solution. Why are we involved about longevity? Is it higher to stay lengthy or stay effectively, and is it attainable to do each? What’s it about our collective fascination with immortality?
His newest documentary is delivered straight from his beating coronary heart through a constant voiceover that may be comfortably at dwelling behind an NPR mic. It lilts up and lingers on ultimate consonants, like he is savoring his personal ideas as they arrive. Within the movie, he turns into one thing of an envoy to getting older, which, because it seems, is an ironic place to be in: Inexperienced is a survivor of a number of myeloma, a most cancers which afflicts the blood plasma of the bone marrow, and he’s a survivor of suicide. His brother died by it, in 2009.
Since Inexperienced can by no means predict how lengthy the present file holder will maintain their title, the movie has taken ten years to shoot. And, in between his visits with the supercentenarians, he muses on the uncertainty of his personal lifespan as a distinction to the brand-new life he is ushering in by his son, Atlas. Inexperienced imagines that his movie may tackle a lifetime of its personal. At its present state as programmed for Sundance 2026, the movie runs 87 minutes; however the documentarian hopes to constantly add profiles of the following oldest dwelling particular person to the movie, making it a dwelling doc of the deceased.
And that is the place The Oldest Dwelling Particular person within the World is at its most magical. Cinema is a device of immortality. It permits individuals to stay on in perpetuity, as long as the movie (or digital copy) is extant. Images retain their time and place; cinema strikes and breathes. Any particular person is ephemeral, however particularly these whose existence is most below the microscope when thought of just for the very fact of their unlikely keep on this earth. What Inexperienced has executed is to peel again the layers which shroud these individuals, immortalizing them past their temporary occupation on the throne of the oldest dwelling particular person on the earth.
Amongst these he immortalizes: Emma Morano, 117, an Italian girl whose secret to lengthy life was to swear off males and eat three uncooked eggs a day. Violet Brown, additionally 117, of Jamaica, whose secret was that, what she “catches,” she “holds,” a reference to Lord Byron’s poem “Imaginative and prescient of Belshazzar,” the place we get the phrase “your days are numbered.” Kane Tanaka, of Japan, 119, who solves math issues to train her mind. There’s Sister André, a French nun, whose final days fittingly noticed her head completely bent as much as the heavens.
And Maria Branyas, 117 years previous and 168 days when she died, who says there’s nothing particular about what’s occurred to her. “A century is a century,” she nonachalantly suggests. And her recommendation:
“You might be so younger.
And now could be the time.
To do good works.”
Somewhat impromptu unintentional poem from the world’s oldest particular person, in August 2024. Inexperienced does certainly do good work right here. Good work to remind us that life is usually made up of little issues. Like petting a turtle, or studying violin. It could be easy, however it’s true. Simply as true as one previous girl who, in response to what has let her stay so lengthy, merely says: “good well being.” Could all of us have it.
The Oldest Particular person within the World screened on the 2026 Sundance Movie Pageant.
- Launch Date
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January 23, 2026
- Runtime
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87 minutes
- Director
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Sam Inexperienced
- Producers
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Josh Penn, Julie Parker Benello, Nina Sing Fialkow, Alex Turtletaub, Jenifer Westphal, Roman Nesis, Alison Byrne Fields, Marni E.J. Grossman