Tadao Okada kept appearing on stage until he was 99. His first and only starring film, the documentary "OiBokkeShi: The 99-Year-Old Star Actor," opens in Okayama on Friday, November 20, 2026, before rolling out to the rest of Japan.
The troupe behind it, OiBokkeShi ("old age and theater"), works across theater and caregiving on themes everyone faces: aging, dementia and death. It grew out of a meeting between Naoki Sugawara, an actor and certified care worker, and Okada, who had been caring for his wife, who had dementia.
Okada was 88 at that first meeting. Acting let him accept his dementia, and he said it saved him. The encounter gave Sugawara a role as director and Okada one as star actor, and the two set off on their journey through old age and theater.
Reality inside the fiction
In plays about aging, dementia and death, the life Okada had actually lived enters the fiction, and audiences are drawn into a world where the imagined and the real blur. Old age itself offered no escape. Okada nursed his wife until her death, then suffered a cerebral infarction. As he lost the ability to do more things, he moved into housing for older people.
He still wanted the stage. "I want to go out on stage. There is no retirement age for actors," he said, according to the film's materials. The curtain rises on the stage the 99-year-old star actor craved.
A decade of footage
Satoshi Ono, a reporter and director at KSB Setouchi Broadcasting, directed, shot and edited the film. He shaped a decade of footage recording Okada and Sugawara's work into a documentary. It traces one older man troubled by elderly-couple caregiving who found a reason to live through theater and clung to the stage to the end.
“Where does the stage end and life begin? Okajii began acting in earnest at 88, and even as he aged, developed dementia and neared death, he kept seeking the stage. Director Ono has made Okajii's life into a single film. Watching it, I was shaken again by how extraordinary he was.”Naoki Sugawara, actor and head of OiBokkeShi
The film opens in Okayama on Friday, November 20, 2026, and in the rest of Japan from Friday, November 27.