Photos of Selena from the Quintanilla family archives.
Q Productions, Inc./Courtesy of Netflix
Thirty years after her death, Selena Quintanilla’s story comes to the screen in a new way in the documentary Selena y Los Dinos. Never-before-seen photos and home videos from the family’s personal archives provide a behind-the-scenes look at her rise from child singer in a family band to becoming the Queen of Tejano music and the lasting impact she had on millions of fans.
Directed by Isabel Castro, the film paints an intimate portrait of the beloved singer whose promising life was cut short but whose legacy endures.
“I had a thought about the relevancy of who Selena is to this day, the fact that our music is still being played on the radio,” says the star’s sister, Suzette Quintanilla. “I just felt like it would be really nice to be able to take basically our capsule of what we created so many years ago and bring it to 2025.”
That idea evolved into a nostalgic film that draws from the Quintanilla family’s private vault to show the woman behind the music icon and Los Dinos, the family band that made her success possible.
The documentary, which premiered at Sundance and won the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Archival Storytelling, prioritizes Selena’s voice, opening and closing with the young star’s own words.
Selena arrives in a carriage at the Houston Astrodome on February 26, 1995, for what would become her final concert. The documentary features footage from this historic performance.
Getty Images
Revisiting Selena’s Story for a New Generation
Selena’s life story previously reached the screen through the 1997 film starring Jennifer Lopez and the family-approved Selena: The Series that premiered to great success on Netflix in 2020. But Quintanilla felt the timing was right to share a more personal take on the band’s origin story with a new generation. The documentary emphasizes the collective effort behind Selena’s rise.
“I don’t think that people truly understand, the younger generation understands that it was a unit,” Quintanilla says. “Everybody had a role.”
Perez, who joined the band as guitarist and would later marry Selena, sees the film as an inspiring chronicle of growth.
“It’s inspiring to see where they started, as really young kids, and then where it ended up and everything that happens in between,” Perez says. “The documentary does a really good job at touching on all those things.”
A photo of Selena and Chris Perez from the archive. Their love story is part of the documentary.
Q Productions, Inc./Courtesy of Netflix
Building the Story from ”the Vault”
Castro spent two years building the film from thousands of hours of footage from the Quintanillas’ personal archives, which they call “the vault.” She and producer Daniel Torres traveled to Corpus Christi more than a dozen times, spending weeks cataloging home videos, concert clips, media interviews and news reports stored at Q Productions.
“Going into making this film, I was daunted because it was really important to me that this story was told in a different way, in a deeper way,” Castro says. “I wanted the archive to feel raw and as unedited as possible. I wanted to find the story within the archive.”
The result is a deeply personal account told through the voices of those closest to Selena: her parents Marcella and Abraham, sister Suzette, brother AB, husband Chris Perez, and bandmates Pete Astudillo and Ricky Vela.
Suzette Quintanilla and Chris Perez share their memories of Selena in interviews for the “Selena y Los Dinos” documentary.
Netflix
The documentary tracks the family’s journey from dinnertime performances at their Tex Mex restaurant in Lake Jackson to the top of Tejano charts as Selena’s talent and charm broke down walls between regional music and mainstream success.
Castro structured the film chronologically, showing Selena growing from a young girl performing with her siblings to a huge star in the Spanish-language music industry on the verge of an English pop crossover breakthrough.
Home videos show her in a new light as a sister, daughter and wife, while interview footage lets her recount her dreams, ambitions and the challenges of life on the road.
“Having Selena tell her own story was the singular most important part of this whole process,” Castro says.
Selena poses with Los Dinos.
Q Productions, Inc./Courtesy of Netflix
Documenting the Selena and Los Dinos journey
Much of the archival footage came from Quintanilla, who documented the family band’s journey from the beginning.
“I was the one out of the band and the family that just liked to take a lot of pictures,” Quintanilla says. “I never thought in a million years that this would be used for this documentary to tell our story. It was just about documenting our life and moments of our life.”
Castro conducted hours-long interviews with each family member, capturing their perspectives on key moments. “We were really trying to find the story within the archive itself,” the director says. “We edited a lot of the film before we even started doing the interviews.”
In the process, Castro recalls how she got a clearer picture of the family’s collective talent, contributions of bandmates and the hard work that led to the band’s popularity and lifting Selena to stardom. “Her success was a product of this whole family being so talented and pushing as hard as they did,” she says.
Sisters Selena and Suzette Quintanilla in New York before the 1994 Grammy Awards ceremony. Selena would win her first Grammy for “Selena Live!” In the documentary, Suzette recalls how excited Selena was to attend the ceremony as a nominee.
Q Productions, Inc./Courtesy of Netflix
Dreams and Legacy
The documentary shows Selena as wise beyond her years, entrepreneurial and determined. In interviews, she speaks wistfully about missing traditional schooling, recognizing the need to learn Spanish, and planning her future in fashion and music. The film captures dreams unfulfilled: motherhood, a fashion empire, and the English-language crossover that was just beginning.
Watching the footage now, Perez recognizes how young they all were.
“Being in our early 20s and into our mid 20s at that time, it felt like having lived that life up to that point, it kind of felt like I knew so much,” he says. “But looking back on it now and being the age that I am now, to see us back then, it’s like, man, we were really young. We were dealing with a lot.”
The film consciously avoids sensationalizing Selena’s murder, although it is briefly addressed, showing the collective grief felt not just by her family but her legion of fans. Instead, it focuses on her life, loves, dreams and legacy.
“This film is not about victimization. It’s a film about power, it’s a film about joy,” Castro states. “It’s ultimately a film about the beauty of Latino culture, of what Selena represents, which is to be bicultural, Mexican-American. I think that that is more important right now than ever.”
Perez notes that dwelling on Selena’s unfulfilled dreams made grief harder initially for the family, but time has shifted their perspective.
“It’s really important to move forward and keep pushing her legacy forward,” Perez says. “We feel good about everything she accomplished.”
Carrying Selena’s Message Forward
The family and Castro hope viewers gain fresh understanding of Selena’s life while taking away her enduring message about perseverance and ambition.
“She really does live on in a lot of people that carry her in their heart,” Quintanilla says. “I hope that it inspires someone to continue dreaming and to not give up on their dreams. That’s always been something that Selena always really truly talked about.”
The documentary arrives three decades after Selena’s death at age 23, her youthful face forever frozen in time. Thirty years of what could have been.
Castro acknowledges the lasting impact of that loss. “I think that the pain of losing Selena, we’ll never totally recover from it.”
Selena y Los Dinos premieres November 17 on Netflix.
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/veronicavillafane/2025/11/16/in-selena-y-los-dinos-never-seen-home-videos-capture-stars-charm-and-vision/
