Sting will narrate a documentary about composer Nino Rota

Sting is narrating a documentary portrait of Nino Rota, the Italian composer whose work ran from Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita to Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. The film, titled Nino and directed by Walter Fasano, receives a special screening at this year's Venice Film Festival.

Fasano has not made a conventional biography. The documentary takes what its makers call a free and associative approach, following the personal, artistic and spiritual relationships that shaped a composer who gave himself over almost entirely to music. Photographs and archival material are cut against interviews rather than laid out on a timeline.

Rota trained under Ildebrando Pizzetti, Alfredo Casella and Rosario Scalero before turning toward cinema, and he ended up writing roughly 150 film scores. He worked with Luchino Visconti on The Leopard and Franco Zeffirelli on Romeo and Juliet, but his longest partnership was with Fellini, covering The White Sheik, La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Amarcord and Orchestra Rehearsal.

The Godfather made him internationally famous, and his score for The Godfather Part II won the Academy Award for Best Original Score. That reputation sat awkwardly beside his standing with music critics during his lifetime, who were not always convinced by a composer working so heavily in film.

The film also spends time on Rota as a person. Fasano describes him as warm, reserved and famously absent minded, while also portraying him as uncompromising and deeply self aware. For the director, the job is less to explain the music than to leave room for it to be heard.

Sting's narration puts a rock musician at the centre of a film about a concert hall and cinema composer, which is not the obvious pairing. Concert films and music documentaries have had a busy year, from the Queen Budapest concert film opening in cinemas on October 7 to Amyl and the Sniffers lining up a concert film and a live album.