Sam Green's documentary The Oldest Person in the World now has a trailer and a theatrical release plan. Assembly Releasing will open the film on September 10 at the Angelika Film Center in New York City, followed by a September 18 launch in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, with a nationwide expansion to follow. Deadline published the exclusive first look at the trailer on August 4.

The film is a decade-long global odyssey chronicling the ever-shifting record holders of the title of oldest living person — a category where the crown changes hands with some regularity, because the job description comes with an expiry date. Green weaves together portraits of the people who have held the Guinness Record, a structure he knows well: his 2014 feature The Measure of All Things examined other Guinness World Records. Deadline

The record itself carries a strange kind of fame. Jeanne Calment, photographed in 1996 at age 121, lived longer than any other person in recorded history; she died at 122 years and 164 days. The current titleholder is 116-year-old Ethel May Caterham, born in 1909 in Shipton Bellinger, Hampshire, England, who turns 117 on August 21. Deadline

Green, a Detroit native and UC Berkeley graduate, earned an Oscar nomination in 2004 for The Weather Underground and was Oscar-shortlisted in 2023 for 32 Sounds. His other directing credits include A Thousand Thoughts (2018), The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller (2012), and the 2018 nonfiction short Julius Caesar Was Buried in a Pet Cemetery. Deadline

The festival run for The Oldest Person in the World has been extensive. It premiered at Sundance, then screened at SXSW, True/False in Columbia, Missouri, DC/DOX, Hot Docs in Toronto, CPH:DOX in Copenhagen, and the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival. It also opened the 2026 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, which ran April 16–19, and screened at the DOXA Documentary Film Festival in Western Canada and the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York. Deadline

The film is produced by Alison Byrne Fields and Josh Penn. Yoni Brook serves as cinematographer, and the editing is credited to Aaron Wickenden and Sam Green himself.

What makes the project stand out is its built-in ticking clock. Green began following the world's oldest living people years ago, and the subjects who held the title when cameras started rolling have, by the nature of the record, since passed it on. The documentary captures a succession that is still unfolding in real time — Caterham's August birthday will arrive just weeks before the film reaches audiences at the Angelika.