Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata’s new short film imagines a world where intimacy is criminal — and violence is the everyday language of exchange.
Their black-and-white dystopian romance, “Two People Exchanging Saliva” (2024), has been propelled from the festival circuit to major awards attention: the film has won an Oscar and is also on the 2026 César Awards shortlist for Best Fiction Short Film.
Set in a society where kissing is outlawed and slapping functions as currency, the film follows Malaise, a shopgirl played by Luàna Bajrami, as she enters an alluring, perilous relationship with Angine, a wealthy, isolated woman portrayed by Iranian-French actor Zar Amir. Much of the film was shot in Paris at Galeries Lafayette, using the department store’s crisp architecture as a kind of stage set. Vicky Krieps — known for “Phantom Thread” (2017) — provides voiceover.
Singh, a French-born artist based in New York, is known in the contemporary art world for installations, sculptures, performances, and films that borrow from popular culture and lean into absurdity. He is represented by Metro Pictures and Spruth Magers, and his work is held by institutions including the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Musteata, who holds a doctorate in art history, has written for Artforum and has curated exhibitions at Haverford College and apexart.
The pair’s collaboration stretches back to “The Appointment” (2019), a dreamlike short about a novelist trying to decipher a cryptic diary entry. Speaking previously about their shared tastes, Singh has described an appetite that ranges from social realism to austere arthouse — but returns, again and again, to films that feel “imaginative and cathartic.”
For “Two People Exchanging Saliva,” the filmmakers have pointed to real-world crackdowns on personal expression as a catalyst for the premise. They cited, for example, a 2023 case in Tehran in which a couple was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison for dancing in the street. Musteata has described the leap from that event to the film’s central inversion: a culture where violence is normalized while tenderness becomes taboo.
The short’s visual language is equally deliberate. In a making-of video, Singh and Musteata describe using the New York Public Library’s Pictures Collection as a research engine, pulling images that could shape the film’s symbolic vocabulary. The resulting monochrome palette sharpens the geometry of the Galeries Lafayette interiors, while the cinematography nods to filmmakers including Wim Wenders and Luis Buñuel. The film opens with a small image of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s “The Kiss” (1892), a pointed art-historical counterweight to a narrative built around forbidden contact.
Singh has also linked the film’s design to his own earlier work, noting that a black-and-white visual system he developed for his 2007 project “The Marque of the Third Stripe” informed the look of a dress worn by Angine.
Before its awards-season breakthrough, “Two People Exchanging Saliva” circulated widely in 2025, screening at festivals including AFI Fest, Telluride Film Festival, and SFFILM. Its trajectory underscores a familiar contemporary pattern: an artist’s moving-image practice, shaped by research and art-historical reference, finding a second life in cinema’s most public arenas.
At the Oscars ceremony, Singh used his moment onstage to acknowledge the women behind the production, including Bajrami, Krieps, and Amir, who was not present after giving birth two days earlier. Addressing Amir’s newborn, he framed the film’s bleak premise as an argument for art’s long horizon: “That is why we make films,” he said, “because we believe that art can change people’s souls. Maybe it takes 10 years, but we can change society through art, through creativity, through theater and ballet and also cinema.”
