“Two People Exchanging Saliva” by Natalie Musteata & Alexandre Singh

2024 · FR · b/n · Fr/en · 36’ · Swiss premiere

In an absurdist Paris, a personal shopper challenges the status quo.

In a society where kissing is punishable by death, and people pay for things by receiving slaps to the face. Angine, an unhappy woman, shops compulsively in a department store. There, she becomes fascinated by a playful salesgirl. Despite the prohibition of kissing, the two become close, raising the suspicions of a jealous colleague.

The artists

Natalie Musteata & Alexandre Singh are an Academy Award® winning filmmaking duo. Natalie is a Romanian-American writer, curator and filmmaker, with a PhD in art history and film. Alexandre is a Franco-Indian visual artist whose work has been collected by the MoMA and Guggenheim Museum, New York, and CNAP, Paris. Their second short film ‘Two People Exchanging Saliva’ has won numerous prizes including being nominated for a 2026 César Award and winning the Best Live-Action Short Film at the 98th Academy Awards. They live and work in Brooklyn, New York.

Statement by the filmakers

“We wrote this in early 2023 in response to the absurd and alarming realities unfolding around the world. In the United States, the rise of extremist movements and growing polarization highlighted the fragility of democratic norms.

In Iran, we were inspired by the courage of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, while also shocked by related news stories, such as an 18-year-old couple sentenced to ten years in prison for dancing in front of Tehran’s Freedom Tower, and countless young women being shot, abducted, or killed for refusing to wear a headscarf. The extremity and absurdity of these eventsboth at home and abroad—felt almost surreal, as if they belonged in the world of a film rather than reality.

Since then, the sense of absurdity in the real world has only intensified. Rising autocracies, the erosion of civil liberties, and increasing restrictions on personal freedoms in countries around the globe—from the murders of protesters in Iran to the abduction of people by ICE in the United States—make it feel as though the world is moving backward rather than forward.”