Sony Classics Acquires North American Rights to Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘The Room Next Door’ with Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, John Turturro

Sony Pictures Classics announced today that they have acquired all rights in North America, the Middle East, India, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand to Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language feature film, The Room Next Door, starring Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton, and John Turturro. Produced by Almodóvar’s El Deseo, the film will begin shooting this March in New York and Madrid.

In Almodóvar words, “The Room Next Door is about a very imperfect mother and her resentful daughter, who live separate lives because of a profound misunderstanding. Ingrid (played by Julianne Moore), a friend of the mother, will become the custodian to mother and daughter’s pain and bitterness. Martha, the mother (played by Tilda Swinton), is a war correspondent and Ingrid is an auto fiction novelist.

The film talks about the unlimited cruelty of wars, the two different ways these two writers have of approaching and writing about reality, also about death, and how friendship and sexual pleasure can be the best allies to deal with horror. It also talks about the pleasure of waking up to birds bringing a new day at a house built on a natural reserve in New England, where the two friends live an extraordinary and awkwardly sweet situation.”

Sony Pictures Classics has released many of Almodóvar’s films, most recently his Oscar-nominated feature Parallel Mothers and the short films Strange Way of Life and The Human Voice. The latter, which also stars Swinton, marked Almodóvar’s first English-language film.

Additionally, both Swinton and Moore have starred in several other films released by Sony Pictures Classics. Swinton’s work with the distributor includes Orlando, Only Lovers Left Alive, and Young Adam, and Moore has previously starred in Still Alice (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress), Safe, and more.