(L–R) Atlas Green and Sam Green attend the Q&A for “The Oldest Person in the World” by Sam Green, an official selection of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. (Photo by Sam Emenogu/Sundance Institute)
By Lucy Spicer
When Sundance Film Festival Director Eugene Hernandez describes filmmaker Sam Green as having “a long history with Sundance,” he’s not kidding. Green’s very first short film, The Rainbow Man/John 3:16, premiered at the Festival in 1997, and he’s directed more than a dozen Sundance Institute–supported projects since. On January 23, he’s premiering his latest feature, The Oldest Person in the World, at The Ray Theatre in Park City as part of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s Premieres section.
A fan of the Guinness Book of World Records when he was younger, Green initially conceived the project as a straightforward, continuous chronicle of the current oldest person on the planet. “At first I really did just think, ‘Oh, this will be great, I’ll make a movie, I’ll film every person who’s the oldest person in the world and that’ll be it!” says Green at the film’s post-premiere Q&A. “It’s like a movie that makes itself. You always think that in the beginning. Like, it feels so easy!”
It was not, in fact, easy. Green and his fellow editor, Aaron Wickenden, would edit the footage together periodically as they tried to encourage the film to take shape. “We put something together that was all these different portraits. After a while, you’re like, ‘Not another one,’” recounts Green to a chuckling audience. “You couldn’t really sustain that, and they’re always the same age. There’s no time passing. So it’s like this weird, timeless thing.”
So Green looked to his own life, where time was passing in the most noticeable of ways. At the beginning of the project, his wife gave birth to a son, Atlas — very briefly the youngest person in the world. And as his son’s life bloomed more each day, Green would have to face the prospect of his own mortality when he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma at age 50.
The interviews with the world’s oldest individuals take on new meaning, both for Green and for us as an audience as the director provides voice-over narration that contemplates his own thoughts about life and death as well as the attitudes of the people he’s interviewing.
The interviews with the supercentenarians are mostly fascinating because they all differ greatly from one another. Susannah Mushatt Jones slept through her 116th birthday party in Brooklyn. In Jamaica, Violet Brown was able to recite a poem she had memorized more than a century ago. In Spain, Maria Branyas was active on Twitter. Sister André became a nun in France at age 40 and lived until she was 117.
The contrast in footage between these very old women and Green’s son is difficult to overlook. The oldest individuals in the world tremble and speak with effort while Atlas jumps around with boundless energy. But neither the elderly nor the child dwells on death. Meanwhile, the film’s director, his age somewhere in the middle, finds himself thinking about it almost constantly, even after learning that his disease is in remission.
The Oldest Person in the World was filmed over 10 years — a nice, round number that the viewer can track in the film through signs like Atlas’ growth and the advent of COVID-19. “Somebody once said this to me, and I think it’s true: There’s nothing more fascinating than watching time passing on camera,” says Green during the film’s post-premiere Q&A. “People aging. I love that.”
Filmed conversations between Green and his son reveal that Atlas is coming to think deeply about time, just like his father. When an audience member at the Q&A asks Atlas whether he feels old or young now (a younger version of him in the film claimed to be old), he replies, “Well, I think I’m young. And I might be old in the future. So, I’m kind of both. Young in the present.”
As for Green, he’s happy for this film to be the first in an endless series of volumes he makes with producers Alison Byrne Fields and Josh Penn. After all, the oldest person in the world is a title that no one holds for long. “The three of us very early on decided, ‘Oh, we’re gonna make this movie for the rest of our lives.’ It’s a totally weird thing to kind of agree to. We got married in a weird way. But it has been a real group effort.”
And it seems the second volume starts now. “This is Yoni Brook here,” says Green as he points to his director of photography filming the theater’s audience shortly after they granted the movie a standing ovation. “And this is the first shot of the next movie.”
