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Matinee: '39 Days in Europe'
15 November 2025
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 630th in our series of Saturday matinees today: 39 Days in Europe.
This 4:24 video by Andrés Villaveces and María Clara Cortés is, in their words, "a response to Roman Kossak's video: one photo, one day -- with one exception! -- during a visit to Vienna, Prague, Helsinki, Rome, Naples and Palermo during the summer of 2025."
Villaveces took the photos in this video, produced by Cortés. The music is Oceano di Silenzio by Franco Battiato. The inspiration is another story.
A Roman Kossak contributed several videos to Vimeo 16 years ago, none of them named One Photo, One Day so we were unable to make the connection. Other than an explanation at the beginning of the video that Kossak made a video in November 2025 of one photo for each day of a trip he took, this is just the first thing we don't know about this video.
The challenge of this assignment is to pick one of the photos you took each day of your trip. Presumably, you took many and many of the ones you took were postcards of the sights you saw. So the temptation is to create a slideshow of sights everyone has seen before.
That's not what happened this time, though.
What we appreciated about this video is how it returns, over and over, to the quotidian. The ordinary. The glimpse of some other life going on as you pass by.
To accustom you to that approach, the video begins with some vernacular shots from what looks like the view from a rail station, a public building at night above some utility wires, a restaurant table shot in a ceiling mirror, a classroom, a dog sitting on a tile floor and so on.
There are no captions or explanations so we're just guessing at what we're looking at. But we began to suspect this is a marvelous way to remember a trip. Each image prompts a story, not just a caption.
And yet, while that suggests this is a personal video, we enjoyed seeing these glimpses into other lives even if we knew nothing about them.
Because, after all, there was still something familiar about them.