English as a lingua franca (ELF), a shared contact language of communication for speakers from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, has become a common phenomenon in a globalized world. Central to ELF interactions is the ability to negotiate meanings drawing on a broad range of cultural repertoires and linguistic resources. Helping ELF learners and users develop this ability is essential in English language teaching. This paper describes how to adopt a Cultural Linguistics approach to explore the cultural conceptualizations in the contextualized languages of two English-subtitled Taiwanese films. The results reveal that the structural concepts suggested by Cultural Linguistics could become useful strategies to negotiate and explain some cultural schemas, categories and metaphors entrenched in films. Accordingly, pedagogical implications from the film-based research for intercultural ELF communication education in English language teaching are discussed.