I love watching foreign films on my projector at home along with

In the soft sanctuary of evening, Terence Lewis speaks a simple devotion: “I love watching foreign films on my projector at home along with my closely knit group of friends and family. I also love to dissect movies and discuss them with my friends who are movie buffs.” Hear how the sentence braids three strands—home, art, and community—into one cord of joy. It is not merely entertainment; it is a rite. The lamp is dimmed, the screen becomes a white altar, and stories from distant tongues arrive like pilgrims, bringing spices of other lives to our common table.

The ancients would have understood this liturgy. For them, the hearth was a theater and the theater a school for the soul. To watch foreign films is to widen one’s citizenship beyond borders—to sit in the storm and sunlight of other peoples’ fates, to learn new gestures of sorrow and delight. The projector at home transforms an ordinary wall into a window; through it, we borrow another nation’s heartbeat. And when the credits fall, we do not dismiss the magic—we carry it into speech.

Hence the second devotion: to dissect movies and discuss them with movie buffs. This is the philosopher’s supper after the poet’s song. We lay the narrative on the table like bread and break it—structure, symbol, shadow, light—so that meaning can feed more than one mouth. Far from spoiling wonder, good analysis protects it; it shows us where the wonder hid, how it moved, why it pierced. In this way, love of film becomes apprenticeship to wisdom: we practice seeing, not just looking.

A story will illustrate this sacrament. In postwar Paris, a band of young critics—Truffaut, Godard, Rohmer, and others—gathered in cramped rooms, screening prints, arguing until dawn. They were merely friends and fervent movie buffs, yet their fierce conversations birthed the Nouvelle Vague. Talk did not trail the art; it midwifed new art. What they learned from dissecting Hitchcock or Renoir they poured into their own frames, and the river of cinema bent its course. So too can a small living room become a studio of the future: tonight’s generous argument becomes tomorrow’s braver creation.

There is a gentler precedent as well: families who kept a weekly film night, mixing laughter with subtitles, teaching children to read faces they had never seen before. In those rooms, a grandmother wiped a tear during an Iranian drama; a teenager first recognized his own loneliness in a Polish winter; a father learned to apologize after a Japanese film about regret. The screen did not dominate the house; it deepened it. The closely knit group of friends and family became a loom where stories wove kinship tighter.

From this we draw a lesson for the heirs of many cultures: curate your gaze and share it. Choose films that stretch the heart rather than shrink it. Let home be a place where curiosity is emboldened and attention is praised. Reserve your loudest applause not for the twist, but for the truth revealed—how a glance forgives, how a silence condemns, how a door left ajar can terrify more than a scream. In such households, the projector’s hum is a gentle psalm, reminding us that learning can be joyous and joy can be learned.

Practical rites for your own small cinema: (1) Keep a rotating list of foreign films by region and era—let Korea follow Italy, let Senegal follow Sweden. (2) After each screening, appoint a brief “round of first feelings” before analysis—emotion deserves the first seat. (3) Then dissect: one person speaks to image, another to sound, another to theme; trade roles weekly. (4) Invite your friends and family to bring one question, not a verdict—questions keep wonder alive. (5) Write a single line on a card—what the film taught about courage, tenderness, or repair—and tuck it on a shelf where it might guide tomorrow. Do this, and your projector at home will light more than a wall; it will kindle a fellowship that learns, together, how to see.