Sam Green's Quest to Meet the Oldest Person in the World

"The Oldest Person in the World" is a decade-long odyssey chronicling the ever-changing record holders of the title of oldest person alive.

As the title inevitably passes from one supercentenarian to the next, acclaimed filmmaker Sam Green traverses the globe to meet each new record holder, his personal fascination with what the title means becoming entangled with events and milestones in his own life.

What begins as a portrait of longevity becomes a poignant meditation on the passage of time, the randomness of fate and the joy and profound human experience of being alive.

Green took the time to explain why he made "The Oldest Person in the World."

I became fascinated by the oldest person in the world many years ago while making a documentary about the Guinness World Records. As I worked on the movie, I was repeatedly struck by the fact that the oldest person in the world is a record that changes often – one super old person dies, and the title goes to another super old person.

But, more importantly, any time the title changes hands, it is big news. Huge news actually – it's covered in newspapers around the world and all over the internet.

Why are we so captivated by this one person who has been around longer than anyone else on the planet? It seemed to me that somehow the oldest person in the world taps into our deepest fascinations and anxieties about aging and death and fate. We are intrigued and tickled that someone can live so long but also profoundly unsettled by the realities of that kind of long life.

So in 2015, when Susannah Mushatt Jones turned 116 years old and became the oldest person in the world just a few subway stops from me in Brooklyn, New York, I figured it was the universe telling me to start this project.

I spent a day filming Miss Susie, as she's known to family and friends, and her 86-year-old niece, Lavilla. It was one of the most moving interviews I've ever done.

Shortly after that first shoot, I reached out to my longtime producer, Josh Penn, and a dear friend who is also involved in film, Alison Byrne Fields, an accomplished impact producer, to see if they might be interested in working on this film as a collective. Both agreed.

One of the challenges with a film about the oldest person in the world is that it will be very quickly out of date. As I mentioned, it's a record that changes often. So we came up with the idea of a never-ending project – we are going to continue to film the oldest person in the world for the rest of our lives, using the material to make a film every few years.

In this way, it will become an ever-evolving "living film," with characters coming and going, just as they do in life. The form will mirror the ephemeral and impossible-to-predict nature of our lives. This will be a life's work.

Since the first shoot with Susannah Mushatt Jones in Brooklyn, back in 2015, we've filmed with seven other oldest people in the world. Each shoot that we've done over the past 10 years has surprised me and reaffirmed my long-held belief that the world is far more interesting than anything I could make up.

We filmed with Emma Morano, a 116-year-old outside of Milan, Italy, whose secret to a long life is "stay away from men!" and who sang us a hit song from the 1930s.

We filmed with Violet Brown, a 116-year-old Jamaican woman who recited a three-minute poem from memory that she had learned more than a century earlier.

We filmed in the south of France with Sister André, a 117-year-old nun who said that God "has some nerve" for keeping her alive that long!

And we filmed with Maria Branyas, a 116-year-old outside of Barcelona, who was active on Twitter and seemed completely unfazed by holding the record, saying, "Not a big deal!"

Along the way, I also regularly filmed my son Atlas, who was born in 2015 (the year we began shooting) and becomes a kind of yardstick in the film showing time passing. We also see as he learns about time, days, years, seasons – how the world works.

In this sense, the oldest person in the world becomes a vehicle or lens through which to understand something about our odd experience of being alive.

A film about the oldest person in the world, a subject that fascinates people across countries and cultures, can have broad appeal and a pop sensibility, but it's also a movie about the mysteries all of us face as we move through the world

How long will we live? How will we age? Will we get hit by a bus tomorrow or live to a ripe old age? How do we go about our days in the face of those uncertainties?

(For information about where to see this film, visit http://www.justwatch.com.)