Why Every Lesbian Needs to Watch The Firefly (2013)

The Firefly (2013): The Lesbian Film That Still Lives Rent-Free in My Head

Hey girls, let’s talk about a movie that absolutely wrecked me when I first saw it and still hits just as hard every time I rewatch it: The Firefly (original title La Luciérnaga), the 2013 Colombian gem directed by Ana María Hermida.

If you’re a lesbian, love stories that don’t sugarcoat grief, don’t shy away from messy emotions, and actually let two women fall deeply, painfully, beautifully in love without making it a “phase” or killing one of them off for shock value (mostly), then stop whatever you’re doing and find this film immediately.

I’m serious. Go stream it. I’ll wait.

Okay, you’re back? Good. Let’s cry together.

The story follows Lucía (Carolina Guerra), a woman who’s just lost her brother Andrés in a car accident. She’s destroyed — like, can’t-get-out-of-bed, life-has-no-color destroyed. Andrés was her everything, and now there’s this huge hole. Enter Adriana (Olga Segura), Andrés’s ex-girlfriend, who shows up looking just as broken. At first they can barely stand each other. There’s blame, anger, silence that could cut glass. But slowly — God, so slowly and perfectly — something shifts.

They start spending time together. They talk about Andrés. They smoke his leftover weed. They dance in the living room to old songs he loved. And somewhere between the grief and the shared memories, they fall in love. Not in a cute, Instagram-filter way. In a raw, “I hate that I need you but I can’t breathe without you” kind of way. The kind of lesbian love that feels dangerous because it’s the first time either of them has let themselves want something this much.

The chemistry between Carolina Guerra and Olga Segura? Insane. Like, I need a cigarette after some of their scenes and I don’t even smoke. There’s this one moment where Adriana touches Lucía’s face so gently after they’ve been fighting and I legitimately paused the movie to scream into a pillow. The tension is unreal. You feel every unspoken “I want you” hanging in the air.

What makes The Firefly so special for me, as a lesbian, is how honest it is about money, class, and how those things mess with relationships — especially queer ones. Lucía comes from money. Adriana doesn’t. Lucía is freshly out (or maybe not even fully out to herself yet), while Adriana has clearly been living her truth longer. There’s resentment. There’s shame. There’s fear that this love is too big, too real, and maybe doomed because the world isn’t kind to women who love women — especially in Colombia in 2013.

And yeah, it’s sad. It’s really fucking sad. But it’s the kind of sadness that feels earned. It’s not tragedy porn. It’s two women trying to hold onto something beautiful in the middle of unbearable loss. There’s a scene near the end with fireflies in a field that absolutely destroyed me the first time I saw it. I still can’t listen to the soundtrack without tearing up.

This movie came out the same year as Blue Is the Warmest Color, and while everyone was losing their minds over that one (rightfully so in some ways, problematically so in others), The Firefly flew completely under the radar. And that’s criminal. Because this little Colombian indie film did something Blue didn’t: it gave us a lesbian love story that felt lived-in, specific, and deeply Latin American, without ever feeling like it was trying to “teach” straight people about gayness.

It’s queer in its bones. The gaze is queer. The pain is queer. The desire is queer. There’s no male character explaining women’s feelings to us. There’s no tragic ending just to make straight audiences feel deep. It’s just… two women falling in love while the world burns around them. And somehow finding light in each other.

If you love films like Carol, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, or Imagine Me & You, Saving Face, or Pariah — you need The Firefly in your life. It’s not perfect (the pacing drags a tiny bit in the middle, and some of the dialogue feels a little on-the-nose at times), but when it hits, it hits like a truck.

I’ve watched this movie maybe seven times now, and every single time I hope — stupidly, desperately — that maybe this time it’ll end differently. That maybe this time they’ll get to keep each other. That’s the power of this film. It makes you believe in lesbian love so hard that you forget, for 88 minutes, how rare happy endings are for us on screen.

So yeah. Watch The Firefly. Cry your eyes out. Text your situationship at 2 a.m. about it. Start a fight with her because the movie made you realize you’re in love with her. The usual lesbian experience.

And then come back and tell me I was right.

Because I am. This is one of the most beautiful, heartbreaking, real lesbian films ever made.

And we deserve to talk about it more.