#alexandre singh

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two people exchanging saliva, directed by alexandre singh & natalie musteata

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Two people exchanging saliva (2025)

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Two People Exchanging Saliva (short, 2024) Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh

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#20: Two People Exchanging Saliva (2024, dir. by Natalie Musteata & Alexandre Singh)

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Two People Exchanging Saliva

directed by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, 2024

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Two People Exchanging Saliva (2025)

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two people exchanging saliva (2024)

dir. natalie musteata, alexandre singh

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Best Live Action Short Film Nominees for the 98th Academy Awards (2026, listed in order of appearance in the shorts package)

This blog, since 2013, has been the site of my write-ups to the Oscar-nominated short film packages – a personal tradition for myself and for this blog. This omnibus write-up is done in memory of two now-shuttered theaters that were very important to this tradition – the Nickelodeon Theatre of Santa Cruz, California (2012 and 2013) and the Regency South Coast Village of Santa Ana, California (2014-2020, 2022-2024).

For residents of the United States and Canada, the nominated short films may still be playing in a theater near you. Keep an eye out!

Without further ado, here are the nominees for the Best Live Action Short Film at this year’s Oscars. The write-up for this year’s nominees in Documentary Short is complete (see the link!). Animated Short will complete the set in a few days. Films predominantly in a language other than English are listed with their nation(s) of origin.

The Singers (2025)

Based on Ivan Turgenev’s short story “Singers” (published in 1852 as part of A Sportsman’s Sketches), Sam A. Davis’ The Singers transposes the original source material to a dark, snowy evening at an American bar. One of the patrons is bothering others, asking if they might buy him a drink. The bartender, annoyed by this patron’s brusqueness and boastfulness, challenges him to out-sing his fellow bar patrons. He then extends the offer to an impromptu singing contest – whoever can sing the best will receive free drinks for the evening. The film then unfolds as a succession of men willing to take up the challenge. But, as each singer follows the other, their raw musicality seems to suggest unspoken emotions: heartbreak, loss, loneliness, and the last embers of bitterness.

From Netflix and qualifying for this year’s Academy Awards by winning Best Narrative Short at the 2025 Indy Shorts International Film Festival in Indianapolis, The Singers was actually shot nowhere near what appears to be the heart of rural America. I do not know where the exterior shots of the bar took place, but the interiors are of the La Habra Moose Lodge in La Habra, California (southeast of Los Angeles, in Orange County). Credit casting director Natalie Lin (2024’s Dìdi, 2026’s Josephine) for her sharp eye for faces and personas to make an otherwise unbelievable short film seem somewhat plausible. Director/cinematographer Sam A. Davis’ (2024’s Nai Nai & Wài Pó, Dìdi) use of 35mm film is a very un-Netflix decision. And his progression of the film’s extremely low lighting (a hallmark of modern filmmaking) from its dark opening minutes to the warm finale contributes to the emotional expressiveness of this film, while not destroying the viewers’ sense of space.

Nevertheless, the transition from the film’s dialogue-driven prologue to its musical middle and end feels abrupt, and I profess not being a fan of the near-constant medium-close to close shots. The Singers never shakes off my perceptions of the film as a gimmick. But a well-made gimmick it is!

My rating: 7/10

A Friend of Dorothy (2025)

“A friend of Dorothy” is a code phrase among LGBTQ+ individuals to identify other queer people (originally, the term was mostly for gay men). First-time director Lee Knight’s A Friend of Dorothy is indeed a queer film, but buries that underneath an otherwise charming story of the friendship of an 87-year old woman and a 17-year old schoolboy. The former is Dorothy (Miriam Margolyes), the latter is JJ (Alistair Nwachukwu).

Our opening scene sees JJ, alongside Dorothy’s spoiled grandson (Oscar Lloyd), learning of their inheritance from the late Dorothy from the will executor (Stephen Fry). From there, we flash back. One day, after JJ accidentally kicks his soccer ball into Dorothy’s yard. She invites him in, and quickly discovers JJ’s aspirations on becoming an actor (something his parents – who want him to be a footballer – do not condone). The widowed Dorothy has been collecting novels and plays for years and invites JJ to perform an impromptu reading. JJ still expresses trepidation despite a wonderful first reading, and she invites him back for more readings, to encourage him to pursue this potential passion.

A Friend of Dorothy is fundamentally, as the opening scene literalizes, a film about inheritance. Almost ninety, Dorothy’s body is failing her while her mind is sharp as ever. But her grandson too bluntly asks if it might be better if she went to a nursing home, Dorothy has no one left to confide in, to socialize with. So when JJ arrives, she finds herself reinvigorated, someone to share her artistic passions with, to inspire when she is gone. Margolyes and Nwachukwu are at opposite ends of life, but they form the best acting tandem among this year’s nominees. Even when Knight’s screenplay (based on a late elderly friend of his) hits upon predictable beats, their acting mostly overcomes the straightforward, but heartfelt storytelling.

My rating: 7.5/10

Butcher's Stain (2025, Israel)

It might surprise some of you that roughly one-fifth of Israel’s population is of Arab descent. For a secular state founded as a Jewish homeland and where Judaism heavily influences its laws, Arab Israelis are rarely front and center in narrative art and in the news. Meyer Levinson-Blount’s Butcher’s Stain qualified for the Oscars by winning a silver medal at last year’s Student Academy Awards (as a production of the University of Tel Aviv). Butcher’s Stain sees Samir (Omar Sameer), an Arab Israeli butcher working in a Tel Aviv supermarket when, one day, his supervisor confronts him over an alleged incident. According to his supervisor, an unidentified coworker claims that they saw Samir tear down the pictures of the Gaza War hostages in the break room in the early morning. Samir denies this. For the next few days, Samir – despite moral reassurances from a close coworker – is on emotional tenterhooks.

The premise – centering itself on an Arab Israeli protagonist – is rather novel for Israeli filmmaking. Its pressure-cooker scenario is intelligently drawn in the best ensemble performance of this year’s set, as well as some fascinating camerawork when Samir follows a coworker to see what he is going to do inside the break room. Preventing Butcher’s Stain from reaching the recent heights of this category, however, is the underdeveloped and poorly-connected subplot regarding Samir’s ex-wife and visitation rights over their son. The subplot clearly is meant to further humanize Samir, to give him dimensions beyond his occupation. But our A-plot and B-plot are not in any aesthetic, narrative, or thematic conversation with the other. The presence of the B-plot (the ex-wife and visitation rights over their son), if anything, feels vestigial, a detour best explored in a feature film adaptation of this work. This is nevertheless solid, brave (given the sociopolitical climate in Israel) student filmmaking.

My rating: 8/10

Two People Exchanging Saliva (2024, France)

Qualifying for this category as the Grand Jury Prize for Live Action Short at AFI Fest 2024, Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh’s Two People Exchanging Saliva (Deux personnes échangeant de la salive) mixes the absurd with the dystopian. Partly inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic and the global increase in political violence (particularly the 2022-2023 Mahsa Amini protests in Iran), Two People Exchanging Saliva depicts a French society where kissing is a capital offense, purchases are made in slaps to the face, and few people brush their teeth in order to deter intimacy. Malaise (Luàna Bajrami) is a new hire at a Parisian department store when she meets (and finds herself infatuated with) housewife Angine (Zar Amir Ebrahimi). Malaise’s supervisor, Pétulante (Aurélie Boquien – more interesting names coming in our next short film!), seethes with jealousy over the apparent employee-client attraction.

Shot mostly at the Galeries Lafayette Haussmann in Paris after the store’s closing time, the film’s evocative black-and-white cinematography was as much a necessity as it was a preference. As a necessity, the black-and-white allows the narrative to appear as if shot during the daytime; as a preference, the black-and-white emphasizes the austerity and emotional emptiness of this alternate reality (an intentional thematic connection and tribute to 1987’s Wings of Desire). Two People Exchanging Saliva works better as an absurd dramedy than it does a romance – though it quietly champions its queer love story, Bajrami and Boquien’s performances never progress beyond glances of slight infatuation. Perhaps that is reflective of the lack of emotional intimacy in that alternate reality. The film’s ludicrous approach may fall flat for some. But like a strike to the face, Two People Exchanging Saliva is nothing if not memorable.

My rating: 8.5/10

Jane Austen's Period Drama (2024)

Few people think that I, a straight Asian American male in his early 30s, care much for British period pieces. Most of the time, I have to be in the right mood to watch one, and I have no patience for anachronism-heavy period pieces (see: Bridgerton). Qualifying for the Academy Awards by winning the Jury Award for Comedy at Aspen Shortsfest, Julia Aks and Steve Pinder’s Jane Austen’s Period Drama is complete with anachronistic dialogue. But since the film is a bona fide comedy (and not pretending to be anything else), my reservations disappeared shortly after it began.

Did you enjoy the names in Two People Exchanging Saliva? Well, here goes!

England, 1813. Walking outside the Talbot estate, Mr. James Dickley (Ta’imua) bends down on one knee to propose marriage to Ms. Estrogenia Talbot (Julia Aks) when he notices that she is bleeding. Believing Ms. Talbot wounded, Mr. Dickley lifts his beloved and carries her back all the way to her estate, promising to fetch Dr. Bangley (Dustin Ingram). Ms. Talbot, contrary to Mr. Dickley’s beliefs, is not wounded. And from the title of this film, you can probably hazard a guess as to where the blood came from.

Jane Austen’s Period Drama is making a lot of comedic hay out of naughty names. So it should be no surprise the film was originally written as a three-minute sketch. The film manages to be gently educational in its mercifully short thirteen-minute runtime – relating to the audience that menstruation is a natural, healthy process of womanhood. Any longer than thirteen minutes and it surely would have run out of steam. With exteriors shot in Connecticut and interiors in a mansion in La Cañada Flintridge – a posh part of the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles County – the film also manages to capture the filmmakers’ costuming and art direction influences with remarkable authenticity. Sense and Sensibility (1995), Emma (1996), and Pride and Prejudice (2005) fans, this one will tickle your stockings.

My rating: 7/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog. Half-points are always rounded down.

From previous years:  85th Academy Awards (2013) 87th (2015) 88th (2016) 89th (2017) 90th (2018) 91st (2019) 92nd (2020) 93rd (2021) 94th (2022) 95th (2023) 96th (2024) 97th (2025)

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.