Indie lesbian films have created a vital place for real queer stories conveyed via a clearly female perspective in a movie scene sometimes dominated by mainstream storylines. These independent treasures with awards have not only changed LGBTQ+ portrayal but also stretched the bounds of cinema itself.
From personal coming-of-age stories to historical romances, supernatural thrillers to light-hearted comedy, this anthology spans decades and continents questioning ideas about how lesbian stories should be conveyed. These films are really unique since they reject to be characterised only by sexuality and instead use the specific to highlight the universal, therefore producing works that appeal much beyond any one audience. Come explore with us 20 independent lesbian films that have permanently altered the movie scene.
Table of Contents
1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
🎬 Release Year: 2019
⌛ Runtime: 122 minutes
🏆 Awards: Cannes Film Festival – Best Screenplay, Queer Palm; César Award – Best Cinematography
📺 Where to Watch: Hulu, Criterion Channel
What this movie is about: Arriving at a remote coastal home in 18th-century France, a female painter arrives to covertly produce a bridal painting of a reluctant bride-to-be. Forbidden emotions between the artist and subject grow as they spend time together.
What we like about it: Céline Sciamma returns the power of observation to women, therefore producing something novel in a field sometimes dominated by the masculine gaze. Against breathtaking seaside settings, this slow-burning romance unfolds with great restraint, each frame arranged like a painting with exacting attention to light and emotional depth. The movie offers a coherent vision of female production free from masculine criticism by deftly using the changing relationship between painter and subject as a metaphor for changing artistic viewpoint.
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2. The Handmaiden
🎬 Release Year: 2016
⌛ Runtime: 145 minutes
🏆 Awards: BAFTA nomination, Blue Dragon Film Awards – Best Film, Best Director
📺 Where to Watch: Amazon Prime
What this movie is about: For a Japanese heiress under the influence of her dominating uncle, a Korean con guy hires a pickpocket to pass for a maid. The complex plan falls apart as the two women start to feel actual affection for one another.
What we like about it: The great adaptation of Park Chan-wook turns what might have been just provocative into something really subversive. The director deftly rewrites the basic material to produce a more pure, more fulfilling love narrative in which every tale turn unveils fresh aspects of the complicated relationship between Lady Hideko and her handmaiden. Originally subdued, Kim Min-hee’s performance is revelatory and exactly captures the path from deliberate deception to real vulnerability in her character.
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3. Pariah
🎬 Release Year: 2011
⌛ Runtime: 86 minutes
🏆 Awards: Sundance – Excellence in Cinematography; NAACP Image Award nomination
📺 Where to Watch: HBO Max, Criterion Channel
What this movie is about: As she comes to terms with her sexuality, a Brooklyn girl negotiates her conservative family’s expectations, shaky connections, and her need for real self-expression by juggling several identities.
What we like about it: With great realism, Dee Rees’ semi-autobiographical film catches the personal struggle of identification. The emotional centre is in the terrible mother-daughter connection between both actresses, who present profound despair and hidden longing. Though the movie follows some trends typical of coming-out stories, its appeal comes from its directness and emotional honesty, producing moments that seem both very personal and broadly relevant.
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4. Rafiki
🎬 Release Year: 2018
⌛ Runtime: 83 minutes
🏆 Awards: FESPACO – Best Sound; Africa Movie Academy Award nominations
📺 Where to Watch: Kanopy, Showtime
What this movie is about: Where their fathers are competing politicians and homosexuality is illegalised, two young women fall in love in Nairobi. Their covert relationship drives them to choose, in a culture that prizes conformity, between love and safety.
What we like about it: This energetic Kenyan video provides a unique look into African LGBTQ+ experiences outside the “single story” that Western viewers are usually provided. Particularly their nocturnal kiss wearing neon paint, which is the ideal visual metaphor for love lighting darkness, the glances between the two young women felt electric. Director Waniri Kahiu shows that African stories can be beautiful and inventive outside the conventional narratives of suffering by building a universe bursting with colour, rhythm, and delight even among tyranny.
5. Saving Face
🎬 Release Year: 2004
⌛ Runtime: 91 minutes
🏆 Awards: GLAAD Media Award; Sundance Film Festival – Audience Award nomination
📺 Where to Watch: Netflix, Amazon Prime
What this movie is about: Reluctant to go public with secret loves that conflict against cultural norms are a Chinese-American lesbian and her traditionalist mother.
What we like about it: The innovative movie by Alice Wu seems like a love letter from director to audience as much as between its characters. Leaving her job at Microsoft to pursue filmmaking, Wu produced a story about how it’s never too late to start over that is both culturally unique and generally relevant. Without compromising warmth or sincerity, the film “subtle subverts,” challenging preconceptions about Chinese-American families, lesbian partnerships, and intergenerational friendships.
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6. Tomboy
🎬 Release Year: 2011
⌛ Runtime: 82 minutes
🏆 Awards: Teddy Jury Award, Berlin International Film Festival; QFest – Best Feature
📺 Where to Watch: Criterion Channel, Kanopy
What this movie is about: Moving to a new neighbourhood, a 10-year-old child identifies himself as a boy called Mikäel, investigating gender identity over a summer of new acquaintances, games, and first crushes.
What we like about it: This little French treasure does something amazing—showing the great through the apparently little. With young actors performing naturally, Céline Sciamma crafts a close-up portrayal of youthful gender exploration that invites ongoing thought well beyond viewing. The film’s strength is in its restraint, which lets spectators see a child’s identity development free from judgement and creates a setting in which questions count more than answers.
7. Water Lilies
🎬 Release Year: 2007
⌛ Runtime: 85 minutes
🏆 Awards: Louis Delluc Prize for Best First Film; César Award nomination
📺 Where to Watch: Mubi, Kanopy, YouTube
What this movie is about: Against the backdrop of synchronised swimming events in suburban France, three teenage girls negotiate desire, envy, and body image concerns.
What we like about it: Using synchronised swimming as the ideal metaphor for adolescent identity—rigid control above water while limbs thrash chaotically under the surface— Sciamma’s debut is superb. The film’s core—desire as something sticky, extensible, and insatiable—is aptly captured in the original French title “alky des pieuvres,” (birth of octopuses). The movie shows teenage longing with such realism by using minimal conversation and maximum visual narrative, nearly hurting to see.
8. The World to Come
🎬 Release Year: 2020
⌛ Runtime: 105 minutes
🏆 Awards: Venice Film Festival – Queer Lion; Chéries-Chéris Festival – Best Feature
📺 Where to Watch: Hulu, Showtime
What this movie is about: Creating a haven from their hard rural life and loveless marriages, two secluded farmer’s women in 1850s upstate New York form a close relationship that turns into a passionate affair.
What we like about it: Excellent talent both behind and in front of the camera is gathered in this disturbing period drama. Against the hard backdrop of rural life in the 19th century, Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby develop amazing chemistry that grows with great patience. The poetic narrative and shifting seasonal settings produce a strong visual vocabulary for emotions these ladies rarely have words to communicate, which makes their prohibited relationship seem all the more valuable and unstable.
9. My First Summer
🎬 Release Year: 2020
⌛ Runtime: 80 minutes
🏆 Awards: Melbourne International Film Festival – Audience Award; Cinema Australia – Best Independent Film
📺 Where to Watch: Amazon Prime, Tubi
What this movie is about: After her mother dies, a sheltered 16-year-old girl is found living by herself by a free-spirited neighbourhood youngster. Their close summer relationship aids in self-discovery as much as healing.
What we like about it: This Australian treasure provides the most rarest of pleasures: an open ending that is rather fulfilling. Two young women find healing and self-discovery via their relationship in a surreal environment created by the sun-drenched photography. Unlike many films where characters fall in love at first sight, this romance develops with amazing delicacy, catching the hesitant, lovely uncertainty of youthful love with performances that seem very natural and lived-in.
10. Ellie & Abbie (& Ellie’s Dead Aunt)
🎬 Release Year: 2020
⌛ Runtime: 82 minutes
🏆 Awards: Sydney Film Festival – Audience Award; Australian Academy nomination
📺 Where to Watch: Amazon Prime, Netflix (select regions)
What this movie is about: The ghost of her lesbian aunt unexpectedly helps a high school student preparing to ask her crush to the official dance return to guide her through first love and coming out.
What we like about it: This wonderful magical romance does something unique: it uses comedy to link modern queer teenage experiences with the sometimes brutal past of LGBTQ+ rights movements. The all-female main cast of the movie has delightful performances that strike a mix between comedy and really poignant intergenerational understanding moments. Benevolent meditation on how past generations earned today’s liberties underlie its light-hearted ghost story concept.
11. Mosquita y Mari
🎬 Release Year: 2012
⌛ Runtime: 85 minutes
🏆 Awards: Independent Spirit John Cassavetes Award nomination; Outfest – Special Programming Committee Award
📺 Where to Watch: Kanopy, Tubi
What this movie is about: Two Chicana high school students in a working-class Los Angeles neighbourhood create a close friendship that progressively becomes something more, subverting their family expectations and sense of identity.
What we like about it: This close-up view of Chicana friendship catches those delicate, unclassifiable bonds defining youth. Anyone who has ever experienced that mix of envy, protectiveness, and unmet need for a buddy who makes you feel especially seen will find great resonance in the movie. Studying together, bike rides with arms outstretched, rooftop conversations—that feel like freedom itself—that story depicts those bittersweet moments of connection with naturalistic performances and sun-drenched Los Angeles neighbourhoods as backdrop.
12. Disobedience
🎬 Release Year: 2017
⌛ Runtime: 114 minutes
🏆 Awards: British Independent Film Awards nominations; GLAAD Media Award nomination
📺 Where to Watch: Amazon Prime, Netflix
What this movie is about: Returning to her Orthodox Jewish community for the death of her father, a lady rekindles a forbidden relationship with her childhood friend—now married to her cousin.
What we like about it: While keeping the story’s forceful study of faith against desire, Sebastián Lelio’s adaptation veers from the book in interesting directions, making Rachel Weisz’s Ronit more sympathetically complicated. Through restraint—every glance and timid touch bearing the weight of their shared past and forbidden longing—the two Rachels, Weisz and McAdams, produce remarkable chemistry. The provocative personal scenes in the movie reveal how physical connection becomes an act of rebellion against spiritual limitations, thereby perfectly serving the story.
13. Watermelon Woman
🎬 Release Year: 1996
⌛ Runtime: 90 minutes
🏆 Awards: Teddy Award – Berlin International Film Festival; L.A. Outfest – Audience Award
📺 Where to Watch: Criterion Channel, Showtime
What this movie is about: While juggling a new relationship with a white customer, a young Black lesbian filmmaker working at a video store becomes fixated on learning the background of a 1930s Black actress credited only as “The Watermelon Woman.”
What we like about it: With her innovative mockumentary, Cheryl Dunye deftly mixes reality and fiction to produce a complex study of Black lesbian identity over decades. The video pulls together several points of view using “The Search for the Watermelon Woman” as a narrative thread to look at how Black gay women have been methodically deleted from both film history and historical documentation. This first performance does something amazing: it addresses major cultural criticism while keeping humour, accessibility, and the personal pleasures of a developing romance.
14. Go Fish
🎬 Release Year: 1994
⌛ Runtime: 83 minutes
🏆 Awards: Sundance Film Festival recognition; Berlin International Film Festival selection
📺 Where to Watch: Amazon Prime, YouTube
What this movie is about: Centring on Max’s pursuit of Ely despite initial ambivalence and their friends’ involvement, a group of lesbian friends in Chicago negotiate dating, relationships, and community politics.
What we like about it: This innovative 90s movie seems like a documentary view into lesbian community life prior to popular awareness. Shot on a microbudget with non-professional performers, its black-and- white style and experimental methods create an intimate environment where friends assemble to talk relationships, politics, and sexuality with fresh candour. The way the movie portrayed women’s honest talks about desire created a female-centered environment hardly seen in movies, implying opportunities for interaction outside conventional lines.
15. Desert Hearts
🎬 Release Year: 1985
⌛ Runtime: 91 minutes
🏆 Awards: Sundance Grand Jury Prize nomination; Locarno International Film Festival recognition
📺 Where to Watch: Criterion Channel, HBO Max, YouTube
What this movie is about: In 1959 Reno, a straight-laced English professor looking for a divorce meets a free-spirited younger lady who guides her towards her own needs and sense of self.
What we like about it: Director Donna Deitch spent four years and finally sold her house to pay for what would become one of lesbian film’s most important creations—a real labour of love. Filmed against stunning Nevada desert settings, the movie pioneered the representation of feminine desire and a bold happy ending. Years later, Helen Shaver and Patricia Charbonneau’s chemistry still sizzles; their private scenes perfectly mix passion and sensitivity to make this movie a benchmark for LGBTQ+ filmmakers for decades.
16. But I’m a Cheerleader
🎬 Release Year: 1999
⌛ Runtime: 85 minutes
🏆 Awards: GLAAD Media Award; Créteil International Women’s Film Festival – Grand Prix
📺 Where to Watch: Amazon Prime, Tubi, YouTube
What this movie is about: When her parents fear she is a lesbian, a high school cheerleader is taken to a conversion therapy camp and discovers her actual self and first love among fellow “deviants.”
What we like about it: Using laughter as resistance, this candy-colored parody turns the horrific truth of conversion therapy into a subversive comedy. With its tight gender-coded pinks and blues, the deliberately synthetic look of the movie brilliantly underlines the ridiculousness of pushing individuals into preconceptions. Benevolent under its campy façade is a surprisingly delicate romance and keen critique of how society pathologises desire, which makes this a cult favourite balancing wild comedy with real emotional resonance.
17. Circumstance
🎬 Release Year: 2011
⌛ Runtime: 107 minutes
🏆 Awards: Sundance Film Festival – Audience Award; Outfest – Grand Jury Award
📺 Where to Watch: Amazon Prime, Apple TV
What this movie is about: Two teenage ladies discover their sexuality and Tehran’s underground young culture while under more monitoring from one girl’s brother, who has come home with fresh religious fervour.
What we like about it: This complex movie gives a unique look into Tehran’s underground youth culture, where private rebellion stands in sharp contrast to public conformity. Against the backdrop of growing monitoring—not only from the state but also inside the family itself—the forbidden relationship between the two young women acquires remarkable strain. The brother’s change from artistic free spirit to religious enforcer shows how systems of oppression continue themselves via human relationships and makes oppositional love all the more powerful, especially terrible.
18. Show Me Love (Fucking Åmål)
🎬 Release Year: 1998
⌛ Runtime: 89 minutes
🏆 Awards: Berlin International Film Festival – Teddy Award; Guldbagge Awards – Best Film, Best Director
📺 Where to Watch: Criterion Channel, Kanopy
What this movie is about: Agnes, unpopular and aloof, secretly longs for the popular Elin in a dull small Swedish town, impulsively kissing her on a dare before understanding her emotions could be true.
What we like about it: With almost documentary-like honesty, Lukas Moodysson’s unvarnished coming-of-age picture catches teenage experience. As we see the strong emotions of youth magnified by small-town claustrophobia, the portable camera and natural lighting immediately build intimacy. Though its dramatic original title, the movie presents something quite mild: an honest representation of young people discovering themselves in settings without empathy. The last scene of the two girls publicly asserting their relationship still has great emotional impact.
19. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
🎬 Release Year: 2018
⌛ Runtime: 91 minutes
🏆 Awards: Sundance Film Festival – Grand Jury Prize; Outfest – Grand Jury Award
📺 Where to Watch: Hulu, Showtime, YouTube
What this movie is about: Following her discovery with another female on prom night, a youngster is transferred to a conversion rehabilitation centre where she develops unanticipated relationships with other “disciples” under program attendance.
What we like about it: Examining conversion therapy’s psychological effects while avoiding both too strong sentimentality and oversimplified villains, Desiree Akhavan’s adaptation finds the ideal balance. As Cameron, Chloë Grace Moretz gives her most subtle performance; her calm opposition comes from real connection with other “disciples,” not from spectacular conflict. The mostly female production crew keeps the wit and surprising humour of the book while powerfully reminding us that self-acceptance is the most radical act when others want to wipe your identity. They also brings amazing sensitivity to the source material.
20. Thelma
🎬 Release Year: 2017
⌛ Runtime: 116 minutes
🏆 Awards: Amanda Award – Best Norwegian Film; Chicago Film Critics Association nomination
📺 Where to Watch: Hulu, Kanopy
What this movie is about: When a repressed religious student falls in love with a female classmate, she forces herself to face her sexuality and the magical skills she inherited by developing uncontrollable telekinetic powers.
What we like about it: Through amazing visual metaphors—slithering snakes, shattering glass, birds slamming into windows—that externalise emotional tension, Joachim Trier’s supernatural thriller rewrites the coming-out story. As religious guilt shows physically in her body via seizures and telekinetic powers, Eili Harboe gives an amazing centre performance. Against Norway’s austere, atmospheric settings, the film blends themes never seen together in lesbian film—supernatural thriller, religious drama, sexual awakening—creating something very profound in its study of desire as both destructive and liberating force.
How We Selected These Indie Lesbian Films
Our curation process for these 20 independent lesbian films was guided by the following criteria:
- Truly Independent Productions – Films created outside major studio systems with creative autonomy
- Award Recognition – Winners or nominees at prestigious film festivals (Cannes, Sundance, Berlin) or film academies
- Centered Lesbian Narratives – Stories where lesbian characters and relationships form the core of the film, not peripheral elements
- Critical Acclaim – Positive reception from film critics and significant cultural impact
- Diverse Perspectives – Representation across different time periods, countries, and storytelling approaches
- Cultural Significance – Films that pushed boundaries, introduced new cinematic language, or influenced later LGBTQ+ cinema
This deliberate choosing method enabled us to find pieces that changed the way lesbian tales were portrayed on film rather than merely told.
