At any given time, someone on planet Earth qualifies as the oldest human being alive. Not surprisingly, the people at Guinness World Records certify such things. Current oldest person alive: Ethel Caterham of Surrey, England, who is 116 and roughly 197 days old and counting.
Filmmaker Sam Green, fascinated by fascination over the oldest person extant, decided to make a film on the subject. His documentary The Oldest Person in the World, which premiered at Sundance, just screened at the True/False Film Fest in Columbia, MO.
Green (32 Sounds, The Weather Underground) and producer Alison Byrne Fields spent a decade on the film, during which time a succession of people held the record as the oldest person alive – a title that typically isn’t held for long, as anyone familiar with actuarial tables can attest.
“We were thinking maybe a five year [process]” to make the film, Fields commented during a Q&A at True/False moderated by Oscar winner Steven Bognar. “But Covid happened and Kane [Tanaka] wouldn’t die. So, there was a story arc that had to keep going.”
Tanaka succumbed in 2022 at the age of 119, making her the person with the second longest life span ever documented, behind “supercentenarian” Jeanne Calment of France, who lived to the age of 122 years and 164 days.
In the film, Green travels “from senior centers and living rooms to the Caribbean and the Guinness World Records headquarters in London,” as the T/F program notes, “to meet record holders and celebrate their lives.” Yet this is much more than a “let’s visit the oldest person around.” In the hands of Green, it becomes a meditation on how we assign value to life and a reflection on mortality, including his own: in the course of the film, the director reveals he is diagnosed with multiple myeloma and then undergoes chemotherapy.
The Oldest Person in the World is coming out at a time of increasing attention on longevity. CBS News recently hired longevity expert Dr. Peter Attia as a contributor (and quickly dropped him after his name appeared in the Epstein files). On January 1 of last year, Netflix premiered Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, a documentary about tech entrepreneur Bryan Jones, who as that film’s title suggests, would prefer not to expire.
“Bryan Jones, he says he’s never going to die. He wants to live forever. He goes through really extreme measures to be able to do that,” Fields said, suggesting that Jones is missing the point – that if you live an extraordinarily long time, “everyone else in your life is dead. To me, that’s the most significant part. Being alive is about the relationships you have and the people that are around you. It’s like, yeah, you’re alive, but everyone else that you know is dead. So, that doesn’t sound fun.”
Fields added, “I don’t want to live forever. I wouldn’t want to live until it hurts too much, and I can’t do the things that make me happy and then everybody I love is gone.”
Green wants to keep updating his film. Fields said they’re at work on what could be called a sequel.
“We are currently filming part two,” the producer said, adding that she keeps tabs on who’s in the running to become the world’s oldest person. “One of my significant roles is building relationships with the families to get their confidence in us. I have a weekly exercise where I look to see who died the previous week, which is gross. But yeah, we’re underway.”
A sequel might expand the lens somewhat to other super-agers, including perhaps the oldest man alive (typically, it’s a woman who holds the overall oldest person title, but not always).
“The oldest person world has been a man on occasion, generally Japanese. The oldest man in the world right now is a man in Brazil. We have thought about [exploring that angle],” Fields shared. “We’re always monitoring to see what the ‘oldest something’ [is], because partially it helps to illustrate the fact that people are fascinated by this notion. So, there’s like the oldest pool player, the oldest lifeguard… We think about it in that context. That could bring more of the humor into some of it.”
One of people explored in the film is Sister André, who had to wait a while, but eventually became the oldest person in the world. She died in 2023 at the age of 118 and 340 days. Sister André had taken her vows in 1944, meaning she lived the life of une religieuse for about 80 years.
Adding a bit of mordant humor to the Q&A, Fields mentioned, “Sister André, it’s interesting. She’s obviously a nun and the whole point of Catholicism is dying and meeting your maker. And I just felt so bad for her. I’m like, ‘Yes, Sister André, you will die soon!’”
English (US) ·