On October 2011 young Dutch filmmaker Jeroen Wolf started documenting people in the city of Amsterdam, approaching them in the street and asking them to say their age in front of the camera. The result of that is the short film “100 - from 0 to 100 years in 150 seconds”.

© imaginevideo.nl

The aim of this unusual project was to “collect” a group of 100 people, from age 0 to 100. “At first my collection grew fast, but slowed down when it got down to the very young and very old”, he explains. “The young because of sensitivity around filming or photographing children, and the very old because they don’t get out of the house much.”

Finally, Wolf found his very old “models” in care homes, and as he reckons in his blog: “It was a privilege to document these -often vulnerable- people for this project.”

However, the filmmaker found it particularly difficult to find a 99 year-old in Amsterdam. “Apparently 100 year-olds enjoy notoriety, but a 99 year-old is a rare species… And when I finally did find one, she refused to state her age. She simply denied being 99 years old!”, he recalls.

Finally, some 4 months after he recorded his first “age”, Wolf was able to capture the “missing link” and conclude the project, just in time to celebrate the European Year for Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations.