The first time Sang Mi saw a silent movie, she was five years old. Her family had fallen asleep in the family room, her twin brother Sang Eun snoring against her shoulder and her parents and older brother knocked out on the couch. She’d been left with her mom’s phone to pick out things to watch. Sang Mi had watched a few shorts of Glumpy and Friends, where she had learned about why sharing with friends was important, and then an entire episode of Professor X, where the good Professor had defeated a scary monster covered entirely in eyes aside from a mouth of kitchen-knife teeth. When she’d finished cuddling her unconscious brother from fear, she’d gone back to scrolling through options.

Ten minutes passed before she saw it:

“The Mark of Zorro (1920)”

She’d heard of Zorro, so she was curious. Clicking on it, she was confused at first, because no one talked. There was only the music, and title cards that popped in to tell her what was happening or what the characters were saying. She was a good reader for her age, but she didn’t know all of the words, so she knew she was missing some of it. Even so, she was whisked away into adventure. She watched breathlessly as Don Diego Vega donned a mask to take on the role of Zorro and right the wrongs of the world. When the film finished, she was smiling ear to ear.

She fell asleep when the rest of her family woke up, and her mother carried her gently to bed, tucking her in as Professor X, Glumpy the Dinosaur, and Zorro joined forces in her dreams to fight the evil eye-covered-monster which was terrorizing Spanish California. Only for the first time in her dreams, no one spoke.

She had no idea that in that silence a world of adventure was about to awaken.