Soccer, Lola, and the Persistence of Memory
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Reina Bonta with her grandmother Cynthia Bonta (Photo courtesy of Reina Bonta)
Growing up in the Philippines, Cynthia Bonta, 87, survived Imperial Japan’s annihilation of one half million Filipinos and torture of countless more from 1942 to 1945. While working as a missionary with the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, she joined the California Labor Movement that was spearheaded by Larry Itliong, Dolores Huerta, and Cesar Chavez. (Her late husband, Warren Bonta, joined Dr. Martin Luther King in the march on Selma in 1965.) As the mother of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, she played biological and inspirational roles in her son’s constitutional battles that threaten to exile America to the wrong side of history.
Cynthia is the lola of Reina Bonta, 26, and is central to her granddaughter’s short documentary Maybe It’s Just the Rain, which has been wowing the festival circuit since its May 2025 release. (Find a screening near you at https://www.instagram.com/maybeitsjusttherain.shortfilm/ ).
Reina was born in Alameda, California, grew up in the larger Bay Area, and earned a Film and Media Studies degree from Yale University. (To silence any doubt concerning her Pinay pedigree, her singing talent won her a spot on Shades of Yale.) Reina’s parents, Rob and Mia Bonta, are also Yale grads. Her Filipino Caucasian genes come from her father, and she is half Puerto Rican through her mother. Reina’s soccer genes also come from her father, who played soccer at Yale before she carried on his legacy on the Yale Bowl pitch. She met her Brazilian wife, Brenna Bonta, while they were teammates on Santos Futebol Clube in Brazil.
Reina, Grandmother Cynthia with her father California Attorney General Rob Bonta (Photo Courtesy of Reina Bonta)
Reina with her Brazilian wife, Brenna (Photo courtesy of Reina Bonta)
The cerebral athlete played center back on the Philippine Women’s National Football Team throughout its ascent toward qualifying for the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup. Maybe It’s Just the Rain comes from a video Reina recorded on her cellphone during the team’s historic run. The Philippine games afforded her time for excursions with her lola to her grandmother’s childhood city of Dumaguete in Negros Oriental in the Visayas.
Dumaguete is the setting for much of the film. “She (Cynthia) showed me Silliman University, which is where her father was a professor and where she spent so much of her life. I met so many people who were important to her, and we visited her home.”
Reina appreciated opportunities to “find these cultural, personal landmarks” of her grandmother’s formative years.
Shot on an iPhone
Reina didn’t intend to create a film based on the dual experiences of playing on the national team and traveling with her Lola. “It was totally spontaneous,” Reina recalls. “Like any filmmaker, you bring a camera to important life events, but there was zero intention for me to make a film of this footage.
“I just wanted to record it for our family archives,” states Reina of her initial intentions. “Then I ended up looking at the footage and [began] thinking that there was a real story to be told here between the World Cup and this journey that I took with my Lola to her hometown in the Philippines. So, I put it together into a film.”
Reina in her Philippine National Team soccer kit (Photo courtesy of Reina Bonta)
Reina’s film can serve as a conversation igniter between young Filipinos and lolas and lolos before their memories join them in their eternal reward.
“I think it’s a common Asian diasporic conception to be closed off to a lot of the generational trauma that we experience.” As for her relationship with her grandmother, Reina shares, “My Lola has started to open up about her personal history and her experience during the war. And to some degree, she has positive memories of her childhood living through an unimaginable and horrific time.
“We’re actually doing an oral history project together where I interview her in a series of recollections about her life up till now,” reveals Reina.
Of her Lola’s impressions of the film, Reina says, “She describes it as a love letter from me to her, which I think is very sweet. She is quite emotional when we watched [the short documentary] together at various film festivals.”
LAHI was Reina’s first short narrative film and may be streamed for free on Electric Now. It has a tangible connection to her latest film. “My first film was another love letter to my grandmother. It was a short film, shot in Hawaii,” she explains. “I relish any opportunity to honor her life and legacy through the medium I work in,””
The love letter aspect of the 2022 film moved Positively Filipino writer Cherie M. Querol Moreno to write one of our publication’s longest reviews of a short film https://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/a-love-letter-to-lola. Still flattered to this day, Reina comments, “I’m just so impressed at how the reflective action of making the film can also bring you together with your loved ones.”
Old People Are Our Future
The Bonta Family at Reina’s Yale graduation: (Left to right) Enid Rosario, Marcelo Bonta, Iliana Bonta, Reina Bonta, Cynthia Bonta, Andres Bonta, Rob Bonta, Mia Bonta (Photo courtesy of Reina Bonta)
Civil unrest and counterculture stirrings formed the political education and community activism of Cynthia Bonta, a young mother in Berkeley of the Sixties. Reina noted that her Lola sees her early years in the Philippines as more prophetic than America’s domestic struggles during the Vietnam era.
“She’s worried for the safety of my father and our family. She finds it extremely ironic that she came to the U.S. to escape martial law in the Philippines, and here she is 87 years old and ‘martial law’ is potentially finding her again.”
The world keeps on turning. History, too, has a disturbing way of coming full circle. If digital technology has sped up the rate at which history repeats itself, perhaps people can harness AI to accelerate the exit off a destructive freeway. But AI isn’t the cause of the widespread anomie and can’t bribe people to switch directions. Reina proves that spending time with a Filipina sage can help young people identify disastrous patterns from the past and enact the interventions that either ameliorated their consequences or stopped the losses from ever occurring.
Emily Dickenson famously wrote, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.”
Reina didn’t intend to create a film based on the dual experiences of playing on the national team and traveling with her Lola. “It was totally spontaneous,” Reina recalls.
Most of us don’t have the luxury of applying metaphors to our real lives, but the symbolism of birds penetrating our thoraxes suggests an ethereal, otherworldliness to our unseen ambitions; that is, a separation from our material desires. Pretend for a minute that Emily was selected to receive a beatific vision to share with all humanity whether grounded or prone to daydreaming. Downy plumed hope becomes a universal signifier as present as an ageless grandmother. A lola has a mission to point the songbird to the soul, but it’s up to the grandchild to move with the music. For “hope does not disappoint us.” (Romans 5:5)
Lofty are the thoughts Maybe It’s Just the Rain inspires.
Anthony Maddela was born in Seattle and lived most of his life in Los Angeles. For over twenty years, he’s been writing private foundation grant proposals and government grant applications that benefit public housing, hospitals and a children’s clinic. He’s been a staff correspondent since Positively Filipino’s inception and wrote for its precursor, Filipinas Magazine. He and wife Susan Maddela raised daughter, Charlotte, 23, who’s an expert birder and D&D gamer, and son, Gregory, 21, who climbs almost every day
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