Lovi Poe came up with the idea, Dwein Baltazar wrote the screenplay and Easy Ferrer directed it: a Filipino romance about two best friends who agree to help each other find love, and one that spent three weeks in Netflix‘s global chart of non-English films.

Two best friends, worn out by a string of failed relationships, make a deal: they will take risks and look for love again, and each will help the other get there. The official synopsis adds the catch every viewer of the genre sees coming, that they might just find it in each other. That is the premise of Seasons, the 2023 Filipino romantic drama directed by Easy Ferrer, starring Lovi Poe as Charlie and Carlo Aquino as Kurt, and released worldwide by Netflix on 7 July 2023.

What sets it apart from the long shelf of friends-to-lovers stories is where it came from. The concept was Lovi Poe’s. She pitched it to Regal Films herself, developed it with the studio’s producer Roselle Monteverde and handed the full screenplay to Dwein Baltazar, a writer-director with festival prizes behind her. Poe described it at the time as one of the first projects she had ever conceptualized and presented to a studio, and summed it up in a line: “a romantic film about platonic love, close friendship and true love.”

The deal at the centre

Charlie and Kurt insist that what they have is platonic, and the film’s marketing leaned on that insistence. In the trailer Netflix released in June 2023, Charlie goes as far as finding Kurt the “perfect girl” to date, and the two exchange a promise never to leave the other behind, a promise Kurt repeats, slightly revised, by the time the trailer ends. The deal is the engine: once both of them are actively dating other people, the question of what their friendship actually is stops being theoretical.

For Charlie, the new prospect is Hans, a colleague from her office who pursues her persistently. Jolo Estrada, who plays him, described the role in simple terms: Hans falls for Charlie, realises she is in love with her best friend, and has to decide whether to keep trying or step aside. In the story’s geometry he is the third wheel, and the person whose presence forces Charlie and Kurt to look at each other.

Poe and Aquino were open about the kind of characters they wanted to play. Poe said her aim was to make Charlie flawed, “how people are in real life”, with a past that explains why she acts the way she does. Aquino said both characters are genuine in how they care for each other, and both are flawed. The message Poe chose to stress when the film launched was a plain one: “Don’t take people for granted”, meaning the friends who have always been there and whose presence becomes so normal that it stops being noticed.

The supporting cast includes Sarah Edwards, with Casie Banks as Olga, Ivan Carapiet as Elton, Sheenly Gener as Shelby and Jay-L Dizon as Ed. For Jolo Estrada, the eldest son of Senator Jinggoy Estrada, it was a first substantial film role: he finished his college studies before turning to acting, and had appeared on the big screen only once before, years earlier, in a small part in a film produced by his father.

Who made it

Easy Ferrer came to Seasons from very different territory. His feature The Missing, a Regal Films horror story starring Ritz Azul, Joseph Marco and Miles Ocampo, was his debut at the Metro Manila Film Festival in December 2020. He then wrote and directed the comedy Momshies! Ang Soul Mo’y Akin! for Star Cinema in 2021, and in 2023 he directed the Vivamax series Stalkers. Seasons, a romance with almost no genre machinery, is the quietest project on that list. Behind the camera, Steven Evangelio and Ice Idanan are credited with the cinematography and Decky Margaja with the music, while Lily Monteverde, who founded Regal, and Roselle Monteverde are listed as executive producers.

Dwein Baltazar is the more distinctive name in the credits. As a director she made Gusto Kita with All My Hypothalamus and Oda sa Wala, both released in 2018; the second competed at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2019. As a writer for hire she scripted Exes Baggage (2018), a romance built around the weight of past relationships that starred Carlo Aquino opposite Angelica Panganiban and earned him a FAMAS nomination for best actor.

The connection to Aquino runs further. Six weeks after Seasons reached Netflix, Third World Romance, directed by Dwein Baltazar and starring Carlo Aquino with Charlie Dizon, opened in Philippine cinemas on 16 August 2023 after closing the Cinemalaya festival. It later won Baltazar the best director prize at the 47th Gawad Urian Awards. In the space of a summer, Aquino fronted two romances shaped by the same writer: one on a global streaming service, one in theatres.

Two leads with long histories

Lovi Poe, born in 1991, is the daughter of Fernando Poe Jr., the action star who dominated Filipino popular cinema for decades. She built her career over fourteen years at GMA Network before moving to ABS-CBN in September 2021, two months after Seasons was first teased. By the time the film premiered she was playing Mokang in FPJ’s Batang Quiapo, the primetime ratings leader headed by Coco Martin. Beyond the concept, Poe also recorded two songs for the film, “Lifetime” and “Panaginip”, and credit listings name her as co-writer alongside Dwein Baltazar, under her legal name, Lourdes Virginia Moran Poe.

Carlo Aquino, born in 1985, has been on screen since childhood. He won the FAMAS award for best child actor for Bata, Bata… Pa’no Ka Ginawa? in 1999 and grew up in front of a generation of viewers in the youth series G-mik. Poe admitted that she was one of them: she said she grew up watching G-mik and felt starstruck the first time she worked with him, and called him “a very giving actor” who knows when a scene belongs to his partner. His adult career includes the romances Meet Me in St. Gallen and Exes Baggage, both from 2018.

From the shoot to the stream

Seasons was filmed on location in the Ilocos Region, in the north of Luzon, and its path to the screen was a long one. Poe and Aquino first teased it in July 2021. In March 2022, with filming done, Poe wrote on Instagram that the editors and the artistic team were contemplating turning the material into a limited series, and asked her followers what they thought; Aquino answered in the comments that he was all for it. In the end it stayed a feature, running a little under two hours, and arrived on Netflix almost two years after it was first announced.

The numbers from its first weeks are on the record in Netflix’s own Top 10 data. In the week to 9 July 2023, its first three days on the service, it entered the global chart of non-English films at number six with 1.1 million views. The following week it climbed to number five with 2.8 million views, and in its third week it held at number nine with 1.3 million, a total of about 5.2 million views in three weeks.

At home, it was the most watched film on Netflix in the Philippines for two consecutive weeks and stayed in the national top ten for four. The more telling detail is how far it travelled: in the week to 16 July it also sat in the top ten in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, markets with large Filipino communities, and, less predictably, at number seven in both Portugal and Romania.

Where it sits

Seasons is a Regal production, and Regal Entertainment, founded in 1962 by Lily Monteverde and now run by her daughter Roselle, is one of the oldest names in the Philippine industry. A studio with that history making a romance for direct global release, rather than a cinema run, says something about how Filipino popular cinema reached audiences in 2023. The film’s surrounding facts tell a coherent story: a star with a concept, a respected screenwriter, a director stepping out of horror and comedy, and a co-lead with almost three decades of screen work.

What the film itself does with that material is a matter for each viewer. The friends-to-lovers premise is one of the most familiar in romantic fiction, and Seasons does not hide it; its marketing put the platonic pact and the inevitable doubt front and centre. What can be said with confidence is that the idea came from its lead actress, that the script came from a writer with a strong track record in romance, and that, for three weeks in July 2023, a modest Filipino love story found an audience well beyond the country it was made in.