The Fifth Woman Documentary
The Fifth Woman is a short documentary series built around Desiree’s remix of Nina Simone’s Four Women. Nina named four […]
Black News 
The Fifth Woman is a short documentary series built around Desiree’s remix of Nina Simone’s Four Women. Nina named four Aunt Sarah. Saffronia. Sweet Thing. Peaches. This series asks: who is the fifth?
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.
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.
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 is that lineage made present. Her grandmother. The girl. The DJ. All of them, still here.
