First, there were screams. Muffled, yes—but unmistakable, ricocheting inside the long, narrow box containing some unlucky person carried from a white van by two uniformed men and thrown off a cliff.

This is how filmmakers Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh introduce audiences to the world of their Academy Award-nominated short film, Two People Exchanging Saliva. The zanier elements of the premise—a world where currency is exchanged in slaps, kissing is punishable by death, and toothpaste requires a back-alley deal—threaten to distract from its acute portrait of life under authoritarian rule. Yet from the opening moments, the film makes clear that absurdity does not dilute brutality; garlic-flavored gum meant to repel a kiss does nothing to soften the regime’s violence.

Musteata and Singh—partners in life and in art—spoke about their film at Sprüth Magers gallery in Los Angeles, in a talk presented by Frieze Connect. They had arrived fresh from Paris, where they attended the César Awards, one of many stops on a relentless festival and awards circuit.

For Singh, the film’s success and accolades feel bittersweet. “It's two different emotions, because on one hand, it's just joy of all of our work and our collaborators seeing their work being made so visible,” he tells me after the talk, which took place the day after the United States and Israel launched an attack on Iran. “On the other hand, it was, for a lot of our crew who were Iranian, a very dark moment. There are a lot of different emotions swirling around.”

​The film’s international cast and crew mirror its borderless anxieties. Singh is half-French and half-Indian; Musteata is Romanian-American and grew up speaking French; lead actors Luàna Bajrami and Zar Amir Ebrahimi are French and Iranian-French, respectively. Their layered identities lend the film’s invented regime an unsettling plausibility, one informed by centuries of history.

At the talk, Singh drew comparisons between the norms of the world he and Musteata crafted in Two People Exchanging Saliva and life in Iran, as well as other instances of cultural difference and misunderstanding. 

​“In Iran, it is illegal to [walk] a dog because dogs are [seen as] unclean, but people keep dogs in secret,” he says. “I think because we're not within that culture, we can see the strangeness of that.”

​For Musteata, the film’s exaggerated world was never meant to feel distant, fantastical, or sci-fi; rather, it serves as a distorted mirror. “We were creating a surreal parable about what it means to already live in this world,” she says. ​

Musteata and Singh volley ideas about influences, artistic movements, and what makes good art. It’s the dynamic one might expect from an art historian and a multi-medium artist, whose intellectual lives intertwine well beyond the churn of pop culture (“We’ve never watched Love Island. Sorry,” Musteata admits). Although they may argue over the minutiae, Musteata and Singh unite as collaborators and co-directors to create work that can only be achieved through constant and tireless debate.

“There were a few moments where we didn't agree on set, but the reason we can work together to begin with is that we have the exact same view on art,” Musteata tells me. “At the end of the day, we're always striving towards the same thing.”

​In this case, that thing, that common goal, was a narrative film examining the intersection of power, money, desire, and beauty in an absurdist world that looks a great deal like our own. Two People Exchanging Saliva purveys that very little can kill human curiosity, even when the powers that be try their best to squash it. After debuting via The New Yorker last November, the film now travels to theaters across North America and Europe—its parable of repression proving difficult to contain.