Sting to Narrate Nino Rota Documentary Premiering at Venice Film Festival
Sting will narrate Nino – A Film About Nino Rota, a documentary portrait of the Italian composer best known for scoring The Godfather. The film has its world premiere on 11 September in the Open section of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, according to Variety.
Rota composed roughly 150 film scores across a career spanning decades. His collaborators included Luchino Visconti, Franco Zeffirelli and Federico Fellini — a roster that places him behind some of the most celebrated titles in cinema history. His credits cover Visconti's The Leopard and Rocco and His Brothers, Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, and a string of Fellini landmarks: La Strada, Nights of Cabiria, La Dolce Vita, 8½ and Amarcord.
His greatest success came with Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. With The Godfather Part II, Rota became the first Italian composer to win the Academy Award for best original score Variety.
Directed by Walter Fasano, the documentary runs 120 minutes and draws on interviews with figures who know the craft from the inside. Park Chan-wook and Alexandre Desplat — both celebrated film composers in their own right — appear alongside Caterina D'Amico, whose mother, the screenwriter Suso Cecchi D'Amico, shared a deep friendship with Rota. Caterina serves as a first-hand witness to that bond.
Rota's life away from the studios was quietly unconventional. He chose to live in Bari, in southern Italy, preferring it to his native Milan and to Rome, where much of the film industry was concentrated. The Bari conservatory, which Rota directed for nearly 30 years, serves as a setting for the film: American arranger Vince Mendoza rehearses and conducts a celebratory concert in its concert hall.
Rota trained as a composer under Ildebrando Pizzetti, Alfredo Casella and Rosario Scalero — a lineage rooted in the Italian classical tradition that he carried into cinema.
The documentary is produced by Mattia Guerra for Be Water Film, Filippo Sugar and Elisabetta Biganzoli for Sugar Play, and Marco Colombo for Adler Entertainment, together with Marco Morabito and director Walter Fasano. Producing partners also include I Diavoli and Rai Documentari. The production drew support from the MIC-DGCA Fund for the Development of Investments in Cinema and Audiovisual Media and from the Apulia Film Fund of the Apulia Film Commission and the Apulia Region.
After its Venice premiere, Nino will be released in Italian theatres later this year through Be Water Film with Adler Entertainment. The festival's official programme, published by La Biennale di Venezia, confirms the film's inclusion among the 2026 selections.
