For the duration of CPH:DOX, Copenhagen rearranges itself around documentary.
As part of To Øl’s presence at this year’s CPH:DOX, we spoke to director Anna Bruun Nørager about her film “Burning Voice”.
Photos: Anna Bruun Nørager
The film follows Tamara Amer, a Danish-Iraqi activist whose platform Iraqi Women’s Rights supports women living with violence, coercion and control.
The project began while Anna Bruun Nørager was at film school in London, where she came into contact with a network of Iraqi women using social media to organise, share knowledge and speak openly about women’s rights.
“It became my window into another way of fighting for women’s rights,” she says.
Through that network, she met Tamara Amer, who lives in Denmark. From here, Tamara has spent years building a platform that reaches back into Iraq, using her position as both insider and outsider to support women navigating violence, silence and pressure.
The project was broader at first, following several women and several different threads, but over time the material came to rest around Tamara.
“I realised that she herself had a pretty extraordinary personal story,” says Anna Bruun Nørager.
That became the beginning of a collaboration that would stretch across five years.
Anne Bruun Nørager
Two strands, one life
In its final form, Burning Voice moves along two closely connected strands. One follows Tamara’s personal life: leaving a violent ex-husband, rebuilding a sense of stability, raising a child and trying to create a life on her own terms. The other follows her activism and the work she does to support other women.
“Her personal story and her activism are inseparable. She uses her own experiences in the work she does.”
“Tamara has a completely tireless energy and an enormous sense of justice.”
The film is built from years of footage and a large, complicated body of material. It is also shaped by what remains outside the frame.
“There are many things in Tamara’s work that you simply cannot show, because it would put other women’s safety at risk.”
The result is a film that resists easy summary. Negative social control is often described in fixed, flattened terms. Here, it emerges as something psychological, economic and intimate as much as structural.
“It is much bigger and much more complex than how we usually talk about it,” Anna Bruun Nørager says. “It involves psychological dynamics, financial control, and many other layers.”
Music, identity and form
Music plays a central role in Burning Voice.
The score is by Niels Christian Sommer and Nicolai Gabold, while Luna Ersahin of AySay co-wrote and performs the film’s title track, “Burning Voice”. The collaboration began early, with fragments and sketches taking shape during the edit, and the song grew out of that process. Though a theme song is a rarity in a documentary context, for Anna Bruun Nørager, it was never an afterthought.
“I always wanted the film to have a theme song,” Anna Bruun Nørager says.“ I love working with music and sound in film. For me, it is a very sensory way of working with the material.”
For Nørager, Ersahin brought something more than a voice. She recalls the singer, who’s of Kurdish descent, saying, that you are never half of something - never half Danish and half something else - but fully both at once.
“That idea of wholeness is central to the way I want the viewer to understand Tamara.”
A premiere with its own history
Burning Voice will have its world premiere at CPH:DOX on 13 March 2026. For Anna Bruun Nørager, the festival carries a history of its own. When she moved from Thy in northwestern Jutland to Copenhagen at 19, her first job was at CPH:DOX.
“That was where I first discovered documentary as something I found genuinely exciting.”
The premiere arrives, then, with a certain symmetry.
“It feels a bit full circle to premiere the film there,” says Anna Bruun Nørager.
Burning Voice premieres at CPH:DOX on 13 March 2026 and is in competition for CPH:DOX Human Rights Award . To Øl is CPH:DOX’s long-standing beverage partner
