Tejano music superstar Selena Quintanilla has been gone for 30 years, but the late singer’s family issharing unseen footage of her life in a new documentary, which had its Texas debut at Austin’s Paramount Theater at this year’s South by Southwest festival.
Selena y Los Dinos is the first feature-length documentary film produced about the late singer and her family band. Directed by Mexican-American filmmaker Isabel Castro, the movie offers a tender portrait of the lives, love, and loss of the Quintanilla family.
The film follows the family’s tribulations using a tapestry of decades-old intimate camcorder footage and recent interviews woven together. Some salient scenes include: the primary-school aged Quintanilla children rehearsing and making faces at the camera and Selena laughing alongside guitarist Chris Pérez not long before the two became a couple, stitched alongside a recent interview including his telling of their first “I love yous” exchanged in Laredo.
