Caleb Landry Jones and Luc Besson's 'Down the Arm of God' to World Premiere at Locarno
Caleb Landry Jones returns to the Piazza Grande on 11 August 2026, when Down the Arm of God world-premieres at the 79th Locarno Film Festival. The open-air screening is set for 21:30 on Locarno's 8,000-seat square, the festival's biggest stage (Locarno Film Festival programme).
Jones plays Nick, a young pastor in a small Texas town who helps people experiencing homelessness while facing pushback from his own congregation. The screenplay, co-written by Jones and director Peter Brunner, is inspired by true events and was developed alongside people without housing — the film was set and shot within the homeless community in Texas (The Hollywood Reporter; Variety).
Brunner, an Austrian director and a former student of Michael Haneke, describes the film as a conversation starter rather than an advocacy piece, made "at eye level" with people who have lived through homelessness. The filmmakers' stated aim is to foreground that homelessness results from systemic failures, not individual ones (The Hollywood Reporter).
This is the second collaboration between Brunner and Jones, who previously worked together on To the Night. The cast also includes India Marie Cross, Nick Stahl, Mena Suvari, and Jones's brother John P.W. Jones. Behind the camera, Peter Flinckenberg handles cinematography and Brunner himself takes the editing credit. The film runs 106 minutes, presented in DCP 2K colour (The Hollywood Reporter; Locarno Film Festival).
The producing roster pairs a French studio head with an American indie outfit. Luc Besson produces through EuropaCorp — the company holding the film's copyright — alongside Jones, Christian Sosa, and Jon Wroblewski via their Roosevelt Film Lab. International sales are handled by Kinology, the Paris-based outfit that markets completed films to distributors territory by territory (The Hollywood Reporter; Locarno Film Festival).
Beyond the screen, The Art of Elysium — a non-profit that pairs artists with communities in need — has partnered with the film's creatives to launch a companion curriculum exploring empathy, creativity, and human connection (The Hollywood Reporter).
The 2026 Locarno programme, unveiled in early July, places Down the Arm of God in the Piazza Grande strand — the festival's showcase for films intended for large audiences, screened in their original language with Italian and French subtitles. The production is listed as a French-American (France, USA) venture dated 2026 (The Hollywood Reporter; Locarno Film Festival).
For a film developed with the people it depicts, the Locarno premiere is the first public test of whether that collaborative approach lands with a crowd sitting under the open sky.
