The Salone del Mobile.Milano is made into a film in Lost and Roll

The filmmaker Gianluca Vassallo documents the most human and unexpected side of Salone Week: designers, taxi drivers, Polaroid sellers and protagonists of the creative world make up the living mosaic of a city that becomes the centre of the design world in April every year.

Every spring, Milan changes pace. The streets fill with different languages, diaries become packed, and neighbourhoods are transformed into open laboratories. It is Salone del Mobile.Milano week, when the city becomes ideas, encounters and visions, as over 300,000 professionals from 150 countries converge on the event.

This tide of movement, inside and outside the Salone pavilions, is narrated in the documentary Lost and Roll, directed by Gianluca Vassallo and produced by Maddalena Satta for White Box Studio. The film project, which began as a natural evolution of the Comunità Continua [Continuous Community] photographic research commissioned by the Salone del Mobile.Milano from Vassallo in 2024, which saw him working alongside a group of professionals including Francesco Mannironi (photography) and Daniele Guarnera (sound design), with a soundtrack by the English pianist Anne Lovette. The result is a collective narrative that focuses on the dignity of the work, closely observing the people who make the most intense international design week of the year possible. It takes an analytical and in-depth look at the cultural and social world that revolves around the Salone, which has demonstrated its ability to recognise and valorise the transformations undergone by the city of Milan and the unremitting creative efforts of the industry’s community as a whole over the years.

Harnessing a highly experimental approach, Lost and Roll has a narrative structure devoid of superstructures. The protagonists of the documentary build the scene with their faces, gestures, silences and words, telling their stories in an authentic way, without following a script, and leaving the viewer with food for thought on the complexity of the scenario in which they act, sometimes as authors, sometimes as spectators.

Among the characters who bring the story to life are some of the figures who first made the event possible: Maria Porro, President of the Salone del Mobile.Milano, custodian of a cultural and economic machine that redefines the relationship between industry, imagination and symbolic power year after year, and the designers Piero Lissoni, Fabio Novembre, Elena Salmistraro, Gabriele Buratti, Luca Nichetto and Francesca Lanzavecchia, who condense a whole year spent designing into a single week. But there is more to Lost and Roll,  as it looks beyond the official design system and makes room for those who experience the week from a different perspective: a street photographer who sells Polaroids to tourists, a taxi driver who has been observing the city change through the conversations of his passengers over the years. A story that expands outwards from the heart of the Salone to the Milanese hinterland.

The filmmaker Gianluca Vassallo describes the genesis and evolution of his oeuvre as follows: “After years spent photographing and filming the processes, products, protagonists and relationships of the design industry, I became convinced that a film about the ‘inner’ Salone was essential. In some cultures, the end of summer coincides with the beginning of the new year, with the portents and celebrations that accompany it. At a dinner that that has become a ritual for me and other friends on the last night of the Salone each year, we usually exchange greetings and wishes, just as if it were our New Year's Eve. This short film recounts the anticipation of that dinner, observing the mindsets of those who imagine, the arms of those who build, the legs of those who walk, the glasses of those who drink, the eyes of those who question us, the Salone, the city and the international community that passes through it, in the week leading up to our new beginning.

Maria Porro, President of the Salone del Mobile.Milano, had this to say: “For several years now, Gianluca Vassallo's artistic career has been interwoven with the Salone del Mobile.Milano. A uniquely sensitive photographer and filmmaker, Gianluca previously paid tribute to the design community with his 2024 photographic project Comunità Continua [Continuous Community], capturing its vital and relational essence. In Lost and Roll, he provides a further glimpse, an intimate and revealing journey into the beating heart of the event (and the city), a living mosaic of creative chaos, sustainable design and invisible work that nourishes industry and society. Through the eyes of visionary designers, tireless craftspeople and figures such as Munshi – the Polaroid seller on the pavement, a silent witness to 25 years of urban transformation – the film shines a light on the human tide behind the cultural and economic machine that is the Salone. Those faded Polaroids, signs of a Milan in perpetual motion and change, become a powerful metaphor: as ephemeral as a trade fair, as indelible as an iconic chair. We celebrate this narrative that combines permanence and transience, the dignity of making and the magic of designing, reminding us that the true luxury of design lies in the human stories that animate it.

The Italian premiere of the documentary Lost and Roll will take place at the Anteo Spazio Cinema in Milan at 9.15 pm on 16th April 2026.