Penelope Cruz’s “homage to motherhood” will make its way to North America next year…

Entertainment One Films has acquired North American distribution rights to Twice Born, which stars the 38-year-old Spanish actress as an infertile woman.

Directed by Sergio Castellitto and starring Cruz and Emile Hirsch, the epic, operatic film centers on a single mother who brings her teenage son to Sarajevo, where his father died in the Bosnian conflict years before.

“I think this movie is [a] homage to all women, a homage to motherhood,” said Cruz in a recent interview. “It’s a homage to that relationship of mother and child.”

Cruz plays Gemma, an Italian women who returns to Sarajevo in the present day with her 16-year-old son, Pietro. They’re in town so she can tell him more about his father, a dead American photographer named Diego (Hirsch), with whom she lived in the city years before. Through flashbacks, the viewer soon realizes Gemma isn’t actually Pietro’s mother.

“A woman that doesn’t want children obviously can be happy without children. But one that wants to have children that much … it’s very difficult for her to be happy. Of course I understood all that before I became a mother,” continues Cruz in her interview. “But after you give birth you understand in a much deeper way what Gemma was missing.”

The plan is to release Twice Born, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, in the United States and Canada next year.