The documentary, which hits Netflix in late 2025, will first screen in San Antonio at CineFestival this Saturday and Sunday.
SAN ANTONIO — Isabel Castro’s “Selena y Los Dinos” has thus far screened at Sundance, SXSW, Miami, even Australia.
Still, the journalist-turned-documentarian understands that when the new movie makes its San Antonio premiere as part of the CineFestival 2025 slate, it’ll face its most Selena-obsessed audience yet.
“This screening is particularly meaningful,” Castro said. “I’ve been looking forward to this the entire time, even (as) I was making it. I always thought about that experience of bringing it home.”
That’s a fitting sentiment considering what her movie sets out to do: Bring Selena fans old and new into the fold of the Tejano icon’s life through never-before-seen archival footage made available to Castro by the late singer’s family.
Selena’s siblings A.B. and Suzette Quintanilla serve as executive producers on the movie. In what she calls a bit of “cosmic timing,” the family tapped Castro after seeing her 2022 documentary “Mija,” which explored the intersection of immigrant politics, Mexican-American identity and music—a pre-requisite, perhaps, to diving into the family history of a musician who went on to elevate Tejano culture into the Grammy-winning spotlight.
A lifelong fan and CineFestival alumna, Castro understands the weight of her assignment.
“(Making a movie about) Selena, it was always kind of like an abstract dream,” she said. “When they first approached me about it, I was overwhelmed. It’s such a huge responsibility.”
If that’s how the filmmaker felt when she got the job, imagine what went through her mind when she found out how much footage she had to work with.
Combing through ‘a treasure trove’
Those who have watched the 1997 Gregory Nava movie that puts Jennifer Lopez in Selena’s shoes bustiers will remember how it frames the singer’s blooming stardom against the backdrop of familial love and tension. It’s a drama about family as much as about the venue-shaking magnitude of her chart-topping hits.
Castro knows firsthand the staying power of that movie; it was a “profound” introduction to Selena that also helped Castro better understand her own identity as a Mexican-American.
But, she says, Nava’s movie “is narrativized. It’s (turning) this complicated narrative into something that feels a lot simpler than I think it was, a lot more linear than it was.”
Castro is as qualified as anyone outside the Quintanilla family to arrive at that conclusion. To create “Selena y Los Dinos” – to craft a portrait of how Selena the young singer came to be Selena the Astrodome-filling icon – she and her team combed through hundreds of hours of visual family archives that brought her closer to the star’s essence.
“They handed us the key to a closet that has all of their concerts, it has all of their home videos,” she said. “When I saw the archive, it was like discovering a treasure trove. They’ve sat with their footage for a long time and I think they’re eager to share it with the world now.”
While going back and forth to Corpus Christi over the course of several months, Castro and her team sifted through the family archives, working their way through the footage and picking out the bits of footage that show “the organic evolution” of superstar—starting with her very first recorded performance.
The challenge of whittling down the footage didn’t get any easier as they went along, Castro says.
But they did have an ethos that guided the way, eventually netting the filmmaking team a special award for archival storytelling at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival last January.
“We prioritized hearing Selena’s voice. We prioritized seeing home video of Selena; any footage we found of that, we didn’t cut much,” she said. “You get an intimacy in watching the footage that feels really unique and different from watching the (1997) film. You’re hearing directly from her. You’re seeing her directly.”
It was a creative challenge, she says, and also a cathartic one that showed how the Selena people haven’t yet seen measures up to the Selena that’s spurred them to dance the cumbia countless times over. For Castro the former journalist, that was a surprise and yet another revelation.
“(In journalism) you’re trying to find the truth and the cracks in the way people present themselves,” she said. “I spent a lot of time with Selena, and she was just an extraordinary person. She was so charismatic and so humble—all the things that she’s been made out to be. It wasn’t constructed by the family or by her.”
“I love her more,” Castro adds about having spent so much of the last few years submerged in the unheard notes of Selena’s family history and upbringing. “She’s a bigger presence in my life. I didn’t expect that.”
True to a movie that’s showing a different side of the Selena story, “Selena y Los Dinos” doesn’t spend as much time on her tragic death at 23 years old as audience members might expect, according to its director.
What it does do is ground things in the family’s perspective both back then and now, through the pixels of home video and the words of Selena’s loved ones, for a more refined origin story of one of Texas’ most beloved musicians.
“At the end of the film, it also shows the incredible symbolism that Selena now has as a Latina, as a woman, as a Latina woman, (and) what she represents for Latinos in terms of pursuing our dreams,” Castro said. “She’s become this incredible symbol.”
“Selena y Los Dinos” screens at San Antonio CineFestival at 5 p.m. Saturday and 12:30 p.m. Sunday at the Carver Cultural Community Center. Buy tickets here. The movie hits Netflix later this year.