Sony Pictures Classics has acquired the rights to “Parallel Mothers” the next film from Spanish art house auteur Pedro Almodóvar and starring Penélope Cruz.
Filming on the project began last month in Madrid. The film also stars Aitana Sánchez Gijón, Milena Smit, Israel Elejalde, Julieta Serrano and Rossy de Palma.
SPC picked up the rights to “Parallel Mothers” in North America, Australia and New Zealand.
“Parallel Mothers” is a drama that centers on three mothers played by Cruz, Gijón and Smit. Almodóvar has depicted mothers and womanhood in several of his previous films, but this one focuses on imperfect mothers, which marks a departure from his previous work.
The film is produced by Agustín Almodóvar (Pedro’s younger brother) and Esther García through Almodóvar’s production company El Deseo. This marks the 13th collaboration between El Deseo and Sony Pictures Classics. It also reunites Pedro Almodóvar with Cruz after the actress starred in his last feature, 2019’s “Pain and Glory,” playing the mother to Antonio Banderas’ character. Cruz also got her first Oscar nomination for her work in Pedro Almodóvar’s “Volver” from 2006.
Sony Pictures Classics also recently acquired Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Human Voice,” a short film starring Tilda Swinton that was released last year and was the director’s English-language debut. The film is primarily a one-woman show starring Swinton in an adaptation of a Jean Cocteau play about a woman waiting to give over suitcases to her former lover, only for him to never arrive.
“The Human Voice” was released in theaters alongside a digitally restored edition of the director’s 1988 classic “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” and “The Human Voice” will then be available on HBO Max on April 30.