Lolo and the Kid: the Filipino Netflix drama where a con man plants his boy in rich homes

Benedict Mique’s Lolo and the Kid builds its family story on a street scam: an old hustler offers his boy to wealthy households, then helps him rob them. The 2024 Philippine film pairs veteran Joel Torre with Euwenn Mikaell, the child lead of Firefly.

Lolo and the Kid is a 2024 Philippine drama that premiered on Netflix in August of that year, written, produced and directed by Benedict Mique. Its two leads sit at opposite ends of a career: Joel Torre, who has been acting on screen since the late 1970s, plays the grandfather of the title, and Euwenn Mikaell, born in 2013, plays the boy everyone simply calls Kid. The literal translation of the title is Grandpa and the Kid, and the whole film is built on that pairing.

The premise is a con with a family inside it. Lolo, whose real name is Mario, and Kid live on the streets and survive by working wealthy households. The method is simple and cruel in equal measure: Lolo presents the boy as a homeless child in need of a home, a family agrees to take him in, and Kid waits for nightfall to slip out with whatever he can carry. The two then sell the goods to a black-market buyer known as Taba.

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The film moves through a series of these households, and each one is a different kind of mark. There is a middle-class couple, Allan and Gemma; a wealthy businesswoman, Sandra, who lost her parents to an overdose; a gay couple, John and Norman, who lend Lolo money to care for the boy; and later Irma and Joel, a couple who lost their own son to cancer. Each new house is another test of how long a scam can run before somebody gets attached.

Underneath the hustle sits the film’s backstory. Lolo is not the boy’s biological grandfather: he found Kid abandoned as an infant at a moment when he himself had nothing left, and chose to raise him. That detail turns every con into the question at the centre of the story: whether a child raised on cons is better off on the street with the man who chose him or in one of the comfortable houses they keep robbing.

Benedict Mique, from martial-law horror to a family con

Benedict Mique handled the script, the production and the direction, and the film was made through his company, Lonewolf Films, with Netflix as distributor. It is a personal project with a 97-minute running time, and it went straight to streaming rather than to cinemas, aimed first at audiences in the Philippines and then at the rest of the platform.

His best-known earlier feature points somewhere very different. In 2018 Mique wrote, co-produced and directed ML, a psychological horror film that premiered at the Cinemalaya independent film festival. In it, Eddie Garcia plays a retired colonel of the Marcos-era Metrocom police who, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, believes he is still living under martial law, and who takes a visiting student prisoner as if he were a dissident from the 1970s.

Set side by side, the two films share more than their director. Both are built around an old man and a much younger one, and both turn on what the older man thinks he is doing for the younger. In ML that relationship is a nightmare about memory and political violence. In Lolo and the Kid it becomes something gentler: an old man trying to secure a future for a boy with the only skills he has. The crew behind the film includes cinematographer Mark Joseph Cosico, editor Noah Tonga and composer Isha Abubakar; reports from the production place filming in early 2024, only months before release.

Joel Torre and the boy from Firefly

Joel Torre brings decades of Philippine film history to the role of Lolo. Born in Bacolod in 1961, he started on stage at the age of seven in a local theatre group run by director Peque Gallaga, and made his film debut with a small part in a Lino Brocka production shot in his home city in 1978. He rose to fame in the 1980s with period dramas, including Oro, Plata, Mata, directed by Gallaga in 1982, and Karnal in 1983, and later took the lead in the 1998 biopic José Rizal. His record includes three Gawad Urian awards and a FAMAS award.

Joel Torre is also one of the Filipino actors international audiences are most likely to have seen without knowing his name. He appeared in John Sayles’s Amigo in 2010, had a part in The Bourne Legacy in 2012, and starred in Erik Matti’s crime thriller On the Job in 2013, a role he returned to in On the Job: The Missing 8. Lolo and the Kid brought him a best actor nomination at the 8th EDDYS, the awards of the Philippine entertainment press, in 2025.

Opposite him is a child actor who arrived at the film with momentum. Euwenn Mikaell, also credited as Euwenn Mikael Aleta, has worked in television since the age of three, mostly in GMA Network dramas and anthology episodes. His breakthrough came in 2023 with Firefly, Zig Dulay’s fantasy drama, where he played the title role of Tonton in his first theatrical feature. Firefly won best picture at the 2023 Metro Manila Film Festival, and Lolo and the Kid followed as his next major film role.

The grown-up version of Kid is played by Juan Karlos Labajo, better known in the Philippines as the singer JK Labajo and as the frontman of the band Juan Karlos. He became famous at 13, finishing third in the first season of The Voice Kids in 2014, and the band’s 2018 single Buwan remains one of his most recognised songs. Juan Karlos Labajo also recorded the film’s theme, a version of Through the Years, the Kenny Rogers song, released as a single at the end of August 2024. The supporting cast includes Iza Calzado as Sandra, Meryll Soriano and Joem Bascon as Gemma and Allan, and Shaina Magdayao and Alfred Vargas as Irma and Joel.

A Philippine street story for a global platform

Stories about children surviving on the streets of Philippine cities have a long history in the country’s cinema, from the social realism associated with Lino Brocka to the independent films that play festivals such as Cinemalaya. Lolo and the Kid takes a different route. It keeps the setting of poverty and petty crime, but places it inside a family drama designed for a wide audience, with an openly emotional premise and a pop star in the cast.

That choice paid off in its home market. Netflix released the film on 7 August 2024, and by 11 August it had reached the top spot in the platform’s list of the ten most-watched films in the Philippines. Netflix’s Spanish-language catalogue lists it as El abuelo y Kid, one sign of how far a modest local production can travel once it sits on a global service.

The film also belongs to a familiar international tradition: the travelling con artist paired with a child, a set-up that goes back at least to Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon in 1973. What Benedict Mique adds is the Filipino frame of the extended family, where the word lolo carries a weight of respect and obligation that a simple translation as grandpa does not fully capture. The bond here is chosen, not inherited, and the film puts that choice under pressure in every house the pair enter.

Where Lolo and the Kid lands for each viewer depends on what they ask of a family drama. The package states its intentions plainly: a con-artist premise, a veteran actor opposite a rising child star and a theme song from one of the country’s best-known young singers. Its subject, the question of who gets to raise a child and what a better life actually costs, is one that does not need translating.

Tags: Netflix, dramas, Philippines

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