Romanian-born filmmaker Natalie Musteață won the Oscar for best live-action short on Sunday night at a gala dominated by the two biggest Hollywood titles, “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners.”
In an extremely rare situation, the Oscar for the best live-action short film was shared at the 2026 gala between the Netflix production “The Singers” and “Two People Exchanging Saliva”, a Canal+/The New Yorker production directed by Musteață and Alexandre Singh, her partner.
The American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced that these shorts were “a tie” with its more than 10,000 members eligible to vote. But the number of people who voted in the category for the best short film was probably significantly lower than that.
“In a society where kissing is punishable by death and people pay for things by getting slapped across the face, Angine, an unhappy woman, shops compulsively in a department store. There, she becomes fascinated by a playful saleswoman. Despite the ban on kissing, the two grow closer, arousing the suspicions of a jealous colleague,” states the IMDb description of the Mustache and Singh short film.
The story of the French-language film is set in a dystopian world and does not refer to any specific country. The film can be seen in its entirety, for free, on YouTube:
Who is Natalie Musteață, the Romanian awarded with an Oscar in 2026
According to the website specialized in cinema Urban.ro, Musteață built his career in the United States after being born in Romania. She lives and works today in New York.
Before making films, Musteata was a contemporary art researcher and curator. He has a PhD in art history and has worked for years in academia and museums, organizing exhibitions and studying the relationship between art, language and society.
“This formation is also reflected in her cinema. The films she makes are strongly influenced by conceptual art, and the universes she builds often have almost philosophical rules, intended to provoke the viewer to question how fragile the norms we consider natural are”, emphasizes Urban.ro.
The short film “Two People Exchanging Saliva” premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, and quickly attracted critical attention for its mix of dystopia, absurd humor and social commentary.
From there, the film continued to circulate through international festivals until it was shortlisted for Oscar nominations.
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