Janis, directed by Amy Berg – already nominated for an Academy Award in 2006 for the documentary Deliver Us from Evil – retraces the story of one of the greatest blues voices rock has ever known: from her private life, marked by troubled loves and excess, to her artistic life during the years spent at the Chelsea Hotel – the legendary New York hotel renowned for having hosted musicians and artists such as Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen and Janis herself, during the recording of Cheap Thrills, the album many consider the pinnacle of her career.

The story of Janis will be narrated by the voice of American singer-songwriter Cat Power. Janis's life will in fact be retraced through the reading of a selection of letters that Joplin herself wrote to her family, her closest friends and her lovers, during the years before she died at just 27 from a drug overdose at a Los Angeles motel on 4 October 1970.

In a recent interview with NME, Cat Power said she felt very close to Janis Joplin and had certain things in common with her, and concluded:

At that time, I don't think women were truly free to express themselves one hundred per cent on stage. Janis, on the other hand, gave all her love. No one was as strong and powerful as she was with her energy. From this experience, I sensed that the only thing she aspired to was to feel loved. The last one [letter] really struck me because she was apologising to her family for letting them down. It was heartbreaking… I hope everyone can understand how much she loved and wanted to be loved.

Italy will be the first country to screen the documentary in cinemas next autumn, thanks to I Wonder Pictures – an Italian film distribution company founded with the aim of bringing the best documentaries produced in Italy and abroad to Italian cinemas – and Unipol Biografilm Collection.

The film will be previewed in Bologna on 28 September and in Milan on 29 September, when it will be released to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of the singer's death.