EXCLUSIVE: The New York Times’ prestigious Op-Docs platform has acquired The Revolution Against Death, the new short film directed by two-time Oscar nominee Joshua Oppenheimer.
The documentary set at an annual longevity conference known as the Revolution Against Aging and Death Festival will be co-released globally in early December by New York Op-Docs and MUBI. It premiered at the Tampere Film Festival in Finland and recently screened at the Telluride Film Festival.
At sessions as part of the Revolution Against Aging and Death Festival, “fear is in the air — of illness, of invisibility, of dying alone,” notes a release. “Directed by Oppenheimer, the film offers a visceral portrait of aging, death and the quest for immortality.”
Oppenheimer (The Look of Silence, The Act of Killing) is no mere impartial observer of the festival proceedings.
“Haunted by a fear of death since I was a child, I traveled to a gathering of would-be immortals,” he writes of the film project. “I recognized myself, clinging white-knuckled to the hope that I might defeat death. In the years that followed, I discovered that because nothing lasts, everything matters — and eternity lies in change itself. This film is my poem about that journey.”
In a statement, Op-Docs Executive Producer Alexandra Garcia commented, “We are honored to bring Joshua Oppenheimer’s work to the Op-Docs audience with this unique film that is a haunting, observational look at the fundamental human conflict between the reality of death and the relentless drive for immortality.”
The Revolution Against Death joins seven other films on Op-Docs’s 2026 slate of awards contenders, including Living With a Visionary, winner of the Short Film Jury Award for Animation at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival; The Tuners, winner of a Silver Dragon at the 2026 Krakow Film Festival, and A Wolf in the Suburbs, which premiered at SXSW this year. Op-Docs won an Academy Award for its 2021 short The Queen of Basketball, directed by Ben Proudfoot. The series has claimed seven Oscar nominations, including in 2025 for Instruments of a Beating Heart, directed by Ema Ryan Yamazaki, and in 2024 for Island In Between, directed by S. Leo Chaing.
The Revolution Against Death screens Saturday at the Chicago International Film Festival and next month at IDFA in Amsterdam, the world’s biggest documentary film festival.
Oppenheimer is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, widely known as the “genius grant,” that is awarded to “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.” The filmmaker made his fiction debut in 2024 with The End, a post-apocalyptic musical thriller starring Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon, and George MacKay.
The New York Times Op-Docs is a collection of more than 450 short films that “have sparked global conversations, influenced national policies and garnered an array of industry distinctions, including Emmy Awards, Peabody Awards and an Oscar.” Alexandra Garcia is executive producer of the series and Yvonne Ashley Kouadjo is the producer.