The Mother’s Day weekend will see two releases battle it out for female audiences, as The Stone Angel and romantic comedy A Previous Engagement, from Kari Skogland and Joan Carr-Wiggin, respectively, roll out on Friday.

Both are being pushed as mainstream features for women aged 30-plus, though Stone Angel, handled by Alliance Films, and Engagement, self-distributed by Paragraph Pictures (My First Wedding), will open on around eight screens each in slightly different markets.

All three will play Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The Manitoba-shot Stone Angel, based on the well-known Margaret Laurence novel, will also bow in Victoria, Winnipeg and Brandon, MB — the latter being close to where Laurence was born. Meanwhile, Engagement will also open in Ottawa, Halifax and Concord, ON, just north of Toronto, though it is sure to face an uphill battle against the anticipation of Stone Angel.

Alliance SVP Mark Slone tells Playback Daily the company focused its Angel efforts, especially TV spots, around popular women-aimed programming such as Grey’s Anatomy, Desperate Housewives, The Oprah Winfrey Show and House.

‘I wanted to run the spots around water-cooler shows, where I knew we would get a strong female demo. When you’ve got a brand like The Stone Angel, I really believe people will talk about it around the water cooler,’ Slone explains.

Stone Angel, about 90-year-old Hagar Shipley looking back at her passionate life from a nursing home, stars Ellen Burstyn, Ellen Page, and newcomer Christine Horne as the young Hagar. The drama will open in the U.S. in July through Vivendi.

Previous Engagement producer David Gordian (Nouvelle-France) says the Canada/U.K./Malta copro had a relatively smooth five-week shoot back in 2004 on the Mediterranean island. It was delayed in post-production by a squabble with suppliers in Europe, he says, though he would not elaborate, after which Engagement had to be re-edited in Canada.

‘It was a difficult process,’ admits Gordian, who is married to director Carr-Wiggin. He says they were encouraged by the extraordinary response to the film, which opens day-and-date in the U.S. in New York and Los Angeles through Palisades Pictures.

Engagement stars popular Brit thesp Juliet Stevenson (Being Julia) as a bored, married librarian who travels to Malta for a date she made 25 years earlier with her first love, played by Tchéky Karyo (The Patriot).

Meanwhile, the Canuck comedy Prom Wars, about two private boys schools which compete for a prom date with girls from another school, opens in markets including Winnipeg, Kamloops and Abbotsford through Montreal-based Domino Film.

Mongrel Media is bowing the martial arts drama Redbelt, from U.S. writer/director David Mamet (The Spanish Prisoner) in major cities including Halifax, Moncton, Montreal, Toronto, Saskatoon and Regina, while the Italian drama The Unknown Woman opens on one screen in Toronto through KinoSmith Films.

Among new U.S. releases opening wide are the younger-skewing Warner Bros. action-adventure Speed Racer, and the 20th Century Fox comedy What Happens in Vegas, starring Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz, while the Paramount Vantage laugher Son of Rambow bows in limited release.

The busy weekend will also see Peace Arch Entertainment opening the raunchy drama The Babysitters, about a high school senior who turns her baby-sitting business into a call girl operation after having a relationship with the father of two kids she baby-sits. It stars John Leguizamo.