When Elena Mullano first landed on United States soil, she was not stepping into a different country, but jumping into one of the many American films she had seen as she grew up. The 17-year-old Italian hailing from Sardinia, a large island in the middle of the Tyrrhenian Sea, said it was an almost immediate reaction when she stepped off the plane. Mullano was living the American movie.
 
It was an eight-hour flight to the U.S. with another four from Chicago to Charleston, and during that time, Mullano kept finding herself thinking she had been dropped into a movie. “This is a movie,” she said definitively of her experiences in Charleston. Now, it is almost a year later into her time in the Rotary Youth Exchange program, and Mullano said the feeling has not faded.