"Jonaki" means firefly in Bengali. They flicker and move forward with each flicker. The director's grandmother told him that in Japanese folk tales, the souls of the dead will turn into fireflies and roam in the forest. The director loved his grandmother and the inspiration for the film came from her life experience. In "Firefly", Jonaki is an 80-year-old woman whose world becomes unfamiliar as her memory fades. In such a dreamlike world, she searches for her love, but her former lover, now with gray hair, returns to the past world she has left behind.