The Fifth Woman | Desiree’s Nina Simone Remix Documentary Series Featuring Boemo Diale
The Fifth Woman | Desiree’s Nina Simone Remix Documentary Series Featuring Boemo Diale
The Fifth Woman is a short documentary series built around Desiree‘s remix of Nina Simone’s Four Women.
The Fifth Woman is a short documentary series built around Desiree’s remix of Nina Simone’s Four Women. Featuring Boemo Diale, filmed at Thebe Magugu House. Who is the fifth woman? Every woman we came from and every girl we still carry.
Nina named four.
Aunt Sarah. Saffronia. Sweet Thing. Peaches.
This series asks: who is the fifth?
Desiree’s Lineage: Grandmother and Little Desiree
Desiree anchors the series throughout, returning again and again to two women who live inside everything she makes: her grandmother, whose presence she carries into every room she plays, and little Desiree, the girl she has never stopped being.
The fifth woman is every woman we came from and every girl we still carry. She is who we inherited and who we once were.
Boemo Diale: The Emotional Heart
At the centre of the series sits a portrait of Johannesburg visual artist Boemo Diale, whose work explores Black womanhood, liminality, and the act of finding beauty inside pain.
The emotional heart of the series, her story is the moment where the conversation moves from music into memory.
Filmed at Thebe Magugu House
Part of the documentary was shot in the heart of designer Thebe Magugu‘s Thebe Magugu House — a house that already knows how to honour women.
Thebe Magugu’s work has long commemorated the women who raised him, placing them on fabric, making them impossible to overlook. And it is fitting that a series about women finding their fifth voice is told through house music, a genre that women built, sustained, and danced into existence long before the world gave them credit for it.
Desiree: That Lineage Made Present
Desiree is that lineage made present. Her grandmother. The girl. The DJ. All of them, still here.
Who is the fifth woman? Every woman we came from and every girl we still carry. She is who we inherited and who we once were.
The Fifth Woman — a short documentary series by Desiree, inspired by Nina Simone’s Four Women.
Featuring Boemo Diale
Filmed at Thebe Magugu House
Built on house music — a genre women built, sustained, and danced into existence.
