Ilocano BL ‘Patawid’ brings regional queer story to nationwide screens

“Patawid” puts Ilocano queer stories in the spotlight as Benedix Ramos leads groundbreaking BL film now showing nationwide.

There was never meant to be a Tagalog version of the Ilocano BL (boys’ love) film “Patawid,” starring Benedix Ramos.

According to show creator and producer Lance Collins, the project was conceived as early as 2011 as a story rooted in Ilocano youth. “Ilokano was not chosen after the fact; it is the language of the world the story comes from,” he told radar Entertainment.

That specificity runs deep. The characters’ intimacies, social divisions, and even their silences are shaped by their native tongue and provincial upbringing. By centering working-class, provincial lives, “Patawid” pushes back against the Tagalog-centric lens that has long dominated mainstream Philippine cinema.

At the same time, Collins points out that the inherently global nature of the BL genre—helped along by subtitles—allows this deeply localized story to resonate far beyond its origins. What is distinctly Ilocano becomes, in essence, universal: a story of love, memory, and longing that travels across borders.

For Ramos, the film becomes both a personal and cultural milestone, bringing the language and history of the North to a wider audience.

Following a successful international festival run, “Patawid” (with “All the Things I Leave You” as English title) has now opened in SM Cinemas nationwide, arriving just in time for Pride Month.

Directed by Jade Castro, the film follows Jorge (Ramos), a privileged young man, and Kiko, played by rising actor Justin Paul Basobas, a pragmatic worker. Together, they uncover a hidden 1940s queer romance left behind by Jorge’s late grandfather—an intimate history that begins to mirror, and complicate, their own growing connection.

While the film marks another major step in Ramos’ career, after his breakout theater roles and his turn as Bok in the 2025 sequel “Bar Boys: After School,” its true strength lies in its unapologetic regional identity.

Anchored by Ramos’ compelling performance entirely in Ilocano, “Patawid” stands as proof that stories shaped in the margins—and in languages often unheard—still carry the power to shape the present.

“All the Things I Leave You (Patawid)” is now showing, exclusively in SM Cinemas.

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