It becomes even more unfathomable to think that Selena Quintanilla only graced the earth for a mere 23 years when watching “Selena Y Los Dinos,” in part because a day hasn’t gone by since her tragic death when “Dreaming of You” hasn’t played on the radio, but in Isabel Castro’s exceptional portrait of the Tejano singer/songwriter, how much she was able to accomplish in such a short amount of time, having to build a following on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border and create a groundswell that couldn’t be denied by the mainstream or major music labels. Noting the band that backed her up in the film’s title isn’t only an acknowledgement that she couldn’t do it alone with her sister Suzette on drums and brother A.B. on the bass, but as Castro wisely understands, this wasn’t a story that started with Selena when her father Abraham had to defer his dreams of becoming a musician to take care of his family in Texas yet had seen firsthand the obstacles his daughter would face if she wanted to pursue a career in the arts when playing English-language songs didn’t resonate with the Mexican community in America and booking gigs in predominantly white areas was all but impossible.
Of course, he only needed to hear Selena’s voice to cut through his own doubts about how she could succeed on her own terms, but “Selena Y Los Dinos” adds to the legend of the singer without romanticizing what she had to achieve in order to break through to the masses. Having the footage of a deeply unimpressed audience at one of her first shows in Mexico where the sense that Spanish was her second language is just one of many remarkable finds amongst the treasure trove of archival material handed over by the family and what could be culled from the deep dives in the vaults of local TV stations as Selena y Los Dinos refined their act on the road for years before they reached arenas. The crowds grew as Selena did herself from a boisterous kid to a confident young woman, but what Castro illuminates is how as transcendent a voice the singer had from the very start, it was always matched by her spirit, with the infectious joy of performing traditional cumbia music leading to far more songs included in the band’s set than they had ever imagined and little difference between the ray of light you’d see on stage and the unguarded moments the filmmaker finds in outtakes of interviews or on rides on Big Bertha, the tour bus that would take the band from one city to another.
That nothing is lost in translation in terms of the energy that Selena had in bringing her to the screen is a testament to both the passion and skill that Castro brought to the film, building on her magnificent debut feature “Mija” where she devoted years to filming the music manager Doris Anahi try to gain a foothold in the industry to generate that same frisson in speaking to a career as thought to be as well known as Selena’s where inevitably most of the footage was captured decades ago. The director honors her subject with a film as alive as she remains in the memory of her family and her fans and sporting an original Selena Y Los Dinos tee on the morning of the film’s release on Netflix last week when we caught up with her, Castro looked positively exuberant about the chance to bring the joy she experienced herself making the film into living rooms around the world and she spoke about the intense preparation she put into the film and connecting with the people closest to Selena to bring audiences just as close.
I have to imagine how exciting it is to get the call to do this, but also incredibly intimidating. What it was like when you found out this could even be a possibility?
I had just premiered my first feature “Mija” at Sundance in 2022 and I was trying to figure out what to do next. When my team reached out and asked me if I’d be interested in working on “Selena,” you can probably imagine that was a bit surreal and overwhelming. I couldn’t believe it. There was also a part of me that didn’t know how a new story was going to be told. But I set up a Zoom with Suzette [Quintanilla] and immediately hit it off. Suzette told me that there was all this archive that the family had and a lot of it never before seen. As soon as she told me that, I really wanted to do this more than anything because even though we’ve seen the original Selena film and the story has been told over the years, we’ve never had an opportunity to hear directly from the family and to see their personal archive, so I knew this was going to be special. After that first Zoom call, me and the other producers all went down to Corpus Christi as a team and met the Quintanilla family in person and after that first meeting, they made me the offer. And the movie is already out and there are moments when I still can’t quite believe it.
You did such an incredible job with it and it seems like the obvious place to start the story once you actually watch the movie, but I’d imagine other filmmakers would’ve placed the family history and the story of Abraham’s band somewhere in the middle of this, but it provides so much context for everything that came after. How did that opening come about?
The beginning was actually one of the most challenging things to figure out, and that’s true of a lot of films, or at least that’s often what I struggle with — how are we going to enter the story? I thought it was really important to tell her father’s story first because it really gives the context for why he felt so motivated to get the family involved in music when he discovered Selena’s talent. It’s also a very Latino story and about upward mobility in the United States, [of] people trying to reach their dreams and when they can’t, children often inherit those dreams. So it was important to show that Abraham was a musician and had his own band and sacrificed that in order to provide for his family. but that when he saw Selena’s talent, something in him reawakened.
You’re coming from a verite background. What was it like for you to dig into all this archival material and make it every bit as energetic as one of your other works?
Yeah, it’s the first time in my life I’ve worked with archive as the main storytelling device. I went to school for photography. I’m a cinematographer and shoot all my own work that I direct, so I have a particular relationship to storytelling through the camera and doing an archival-driven film was really daunting. But I think it might have been an unexpected benefit because I treated the archival like verite. I wanted to find the film within the footage as opposed to structuring the story through interviews or through a verbal script and that’s a deeply verite-driven practice.
It was very important to me that Selena feel as three-dimensional as possible and that we understand her as a person and a sister and a daughter and a wife as opposed to just a symbol that a lot of us connect to her as. I was surprised by how easy it was to do that [from] the footage when she’s on stage and when she’s being interviewed. From a very young age, she learned to be very composed and turned on in this very amazing way. She was always very honest and a very talented performer, but as soon as she was off stage, you really got to know her as a person [in the footage] and it was easier for me to make her three-dimensional than I had initially expected.
Was there a particularly fun sequence to cut together?
Yeah, the one I always think about was when she’s singing [“Que Crias”] to a man that she brings up on stage. It is a song that really became a symbol of female empowerment and she’s pretending to be singing at her ex-boyfriend. She’s just so empowered up on stage and it’s really inspiring. That sequence was just so fun to build because we were able to see all of the different examples of times that she had done that at concerts and just watching her perform over and over again was probably the most fun I’ve ever had in an edit. It was definitely the most challenging edit I’ve ever done, but it was just so fun because you were able to sit with her footage day in and day out.
From what I understand, the interviews in the film were done in the course of a week but required a year of preparation in advance. What was it like to take on?
Daniel Torres, the producer on the project, and I went back and forth to Corpus Christi where the archive lives over the course of two years and [for] six months, we were [like] two productions from morning to night, five days a week, just basically reviewing all of the archive. Through that process, I really familiarized myself with the footage and we actually started editing the film before we did the interviews, so we strung out everything chronologically and started whittling things down from there and by the point we went into the interviews, my hope was not just that they would give plot and context, but they would really be rooted in the emotional experience of the story so that we could tell the plot primarily through the archive and be able to contextualize that through the point of view of the family.
A lot of the film had been pre-structured, but nonetheless the interviews were unbelievably comprehensive. I didn’t want to risk missing anything, so each interview took months to get prepared and I did months and months of research and my team of researchers did a really, really thorough timeline. But then when I sat down with them, I [had notes] on hand in case forgot a topic, but the interviews were more like conversations and each one lasted four to six hours long. I wanted to be really present for each person’s unique individual emotional experience and I find everyone has different memories and [those memories] change over time too. The plot itself was [going to be] rigorously fact-checked, so I was less concerned about the individual remembrance of each person from a plot perspective and more from an emotional perspective.
Something else you do something in this that’s really subtle but so great is embrace the limitations of the formats that you’re using. What was it like to lean into the VHS element of this as an aesthetic?
I loved that part of it. I think that we have adopted this increasingly homogenized look in documentary, and as someone who is really preoccupied by the meaning and messaging of aesthetics, to be able to just live in the textures of the footage and really maintain it was it was just such a joy. We’re used to seeing everything in 4K and these glossy renditions of real life and I wanted the film to replicate our experience of looking through our family albums and that analog connection that you feel to family memory and mementos. So we really leaned into it.
We did digitize all of the footage from their vault in the highest format possible. Daniel went back and forth, putting all of these kind of VHSs and DVDs and film into suitcases that was then digitized at this place called Iron Mountain. But we didn’t shy away from the edges and textures. I wanted the family’s archive to stay in Corpus as much as possible, so we scanned thousands and thousands of photographs and then we hired this analog graphics studio in London that basically made all of the graphics in an analog way. They printed them out. They replicated the photo albums. We took pictures of the photo albums and they replicated the photo albums, so as a viewer, you get the same experience that we did flipping through those books.
It really cuts deep because of that. What’s it been like seeing this go out into the world so far?
It’s been so, so deeply moving. First of all, I set my alarm for 3 a.m. [the morning of the release] to make sure that it was on the platform and then I’ve just been up since, just reading everybody’s feedback and seeing everyone’s videos. It has been probably the proudest moment of my entire career.
“Selena Y Los Dinos” is now streaming on Netflix.