A Love Letter to Lola
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What does the ocean represent in Reina Bonta’s “LAHI”? (Courtesy Reina Bonta/LAHI)
Her day is not going well. Rushing to complete major tasks before catching a flight back home to California, she responds curtly to a tourist asking for directions on the assumption that she’s local. She was, but not anymore.
“Malambing,” Tagalog for affectionate, she isn’t. Aloof, somewhat. Preoccupied? Yes, and sad. Rarely does she smile. She’s on the last day of a return visit to Hawaii, her birthplace, in the name of filial duty. What’s really behind her disposition unfolds in under 20 minutes that is “LAHI,” a short beguiling drama that filmmaker Reina Bonta aims to screen in major festivals around the world. The film will be available for streaming in 2023 on Electric Entertainment’s streaming platform.
Filmed in five days December 2021 in Oahu about a year in pre- and post-production on a $40,000 budget mostly from crowdsourcing, LAHI depicts emotions and situations occurring everywhere in a diaspora. Its scenes could be playing out this moment in every continent, particularly in the Filipino dispersion, where multigenerational families navigate between preserving ancestral values and surrendering to assimilation.
That would be all our story.
Director Reina and diverse crew at work on evocative Oahu yam farm. (Courtesy Reina Bonta/LAHI)
Community Sensibility
LAHI is about roots and legacy as it explores the precious bond between families’ pioneers and their latter generations.
Bonta could not have chosen a more familiar subject for her directorial debut.
“I sought to pay homage to my journey thus far as an emerging filmmaker, which began with a class called ‘Family Narratives and Cultural Shifts,’ and inspired me to both study film and explore cultural and family stories,” the Yale Class of 2022 grad tells Positively Filipino of the beginnings of what she had originally launched as her senior thesis project.
Reina was a five-year-old with a disposable camera and an infatuation with photography when her “deep love for film” began. Much later on, in the pandemic, she took time away from university to work in Kenya on a documentary on endangered black rhinos. Her next stint was “a wonderful, life-changing opportunity” as a production assistant on the set of CBS' now-cancelled “Magnum P.I.” Season 3.
“I worked hard, often performing menial albeit important tasks, arriving before the sun rose and leaving after it had set, and was able to gain the respect of the seasoned and professional crew I helped to support,” Bonta recalls her learning curve.
“This same group of kind, talented filmmakers then became the support system and foundation for the production of Lahi, working as our camera, grip and electric, art department, and sound teams.”
Partnering with fiscal sponsor Mana Maoli, a Hawaiian nonprofit providing accessible education for younger islanders, allowed LAHI to raise tax-deductible funds. The project’s provenance reflects its community and social justice sensibilities. In her appeal to prospective donors, for instance, Bonta notes the intent to “compensate and feed our crew fairly and justly, who are generously gifting their time to the film” during the holidays.
A Bay Area Fil-Am philanthropist promptly gave a four-figure gift for the project’s “cultural preservation” objective. Hollywood mover and shaker Dean Devlin, also a Fil-Am, “offered a non-exclusive deal to stream the film” in his streaming service ElectricNOW, according to Bonta. (Reina welcomes questions and donations at lahishortfilm@gmail.com.)
Her Hawaiian experience led her to choose the Aloha State for a location, for its “rich history of migrant labor and vibrant Filipino community,” she says. That backdrop “authentically serves the narrative purpose of the project, while also possessing a strong support network of talented filmmakers, became a decision that ultimately benefited the project in a myriad of ways.”
LAHI boasts a near-hundred percent Hawaii locals in the “experienced crew,” Bonta tells Positively Filipino. One in four identify as Native Hawaiian, one in two as Asian Pacific Islander, and one in two identify as women. She herself identifies as a “Filipino American and Puerto Rican woman.”
Bonta and Angelique Kalani Axelrode share writing credits. Kilani Villiaros directed photography and Caroline Ho composed the music.
Native Hawaiian Tikki Willis subtly conveys Mimi’s angst. Filipino Americans Tessie Magaoay is the feisty thrift shop proprietor and Virginia Almonte Savella Harper is “Gabriela,” the patient talk-storyteller who literally walks her best friend’s granddaughter through their historic sugar plantation workers’ village.
Virginia Almonte Savella Harper as “Gabriela” touched to receive Lola’s gift. (Courtesy Reina Bonta/LAHI)
With no lines and only fleeting scenes on camera, non-actor Cynthia Bonta dominates the photoplay as “Lola,” Mimi’s grandmother. In real life, she is Reina’s grandmother to whom the film is dedicated.
Filmmaker and her inspiration on the set of “LAHI” (Courtesy Reina Bonta/LAHI)
Highly Personal
Reina Bonta describes her film as semi-autobiographical. Though she and her protagonist share many similarities, their stories diverge. Mimi displays detachment from her grandmother’s mementos. She seems distracted as Gabriela, the daughter of a sakada or contract worker from the Philippines, recounts Lola and family’s struggle during World War II. Mimi can’t wait to put the islands and Lola behind her. Or so she thinks.
Reina is the third generation of Filipino-white-Puerto Rican unions who has been nurtured by strong, loving and purposeful women -- her mother and grandmothers on both sides. From cradle to college, she enjoyed the guidance of her maternal grandmother Cynthia Bonta, who devoted herself to Reina and her younger siblings while advocating for community issues. Through Cynthia’s stories, Reina’s eyes opened to her grandmother’s involvement in pivotal moments in Fil-Am history and current efforts toward equity.
While Mimi’s Lola stayed behind in Hawaii when Mimi’s parents sought a more affordable life on the mainland, Cynthia was ever-present in Reina’s formative years. Now, in the adult Reina’s premier picture, she is an inescapable influence as Lola, also Bonta’s term of endearment for her.
Images of the legendary social justice champion are seen throughout “LAHI”—photos of her at her now-deserted home, ambling on a woody trail, on a chair staring at Mimi, wading in the ocean, a sight that beckons, comforts and enlightens. Even the early scene between Mimi and the shave ice vendor flashes her name on the canopy of the food truck.
“So you’re not Pinay”-- Hunter Fujitani as the shave ice vendor who thinks he knows better. (Courtesy Reina Bonta/LAHI)
Mimi has no reply to the question. (Courtesy Reina Bonta/LAHI)
“My Lola - the matriarch of my family whom I’ve lived with my entire life - is the grounding force that ties me to my cultural identity,” Bonta says in the director’s notes. As Mimi, she ponders: “What happens when this force no longer exists?”
Reina’s film “points a finger to each of our own fears and insecurities about our unique connections to our culture,” she says, as it " centers the process of connecting back to one’s ancestors as both a healing force and form of activism which combats the forces of settler colonialism that attempt to erase our histories.”
Cynthia helped Reina title the work after their discussion on its themes. Her granddaughter knows LAHI – capitalized for no more reason than emphasis - literally means race and “conveys multiple meanings, including race, heritage, and legacy,” subjects that fascinate and inspire the two women.
The project affirms their inextricable bond reinforced by Reina’s parents, California Attorney General Rob Bonta and State Assembly Member Mialisa Bonta, themselves mirrors of their “supportive” activist parents. Mialisa efficiently “brought calm energy to our at times hectic days of shooting” as director’s assistant on set, shares Reina.
Reina confirms that her work “speaks to third-generation young people who, like Mimi, are searching for their place in the world but are disconnected from their cultural roots.” She realizes the challenges of “plunging into the depths of cultural reconnection” and that “it can be done.”
“I hope Positively Filipino readers (and viewers) feel a renewed sense of optimism after learning about and seeing LAHI,” says the Connecticut-born, Alameda-raised Reina.
And so after opening with Mimi putting away her newly-washed laundry, LAHI concludes on placid waters in which Malambing immerses herself, as if returning to the womb to be refreshed and assured, a warm closing to the filmmaker’s “love letter to my Lola.”
Reina and Cynthia Bonta proudly wear their ancestral finery at the former’s graduation last month. (Courtesy Reina Bonta/LAHI)
San Francisco Bay Area-based Cherie M. Querol Moreno learned empathy, courage and responsibility from her journalist parents. The Positively Filipino and Inquirer.net correspondent is executive editor of Philippine News Today.
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