This article appeared in the June 4, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. For the last three years, I’ve been attending Cannes and writing somewhat indignant reports on the contradictions that surround the festival. “If there is a place in the world where civic cinema exists, it is in the Festival de Cannes,” said French actor Laurent Lafitte, master of ceremonies at this year’s edition. Two other movies at Cannes turned to the politics of forgetting: Julia Ducournau’s Alpha and Sergei Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors. Yet at a Cannes that often left me feeling cold, subjected time and again to overly constructed and instrumentalized movies, Alpha filled me with feeling.