Simply Johanne

“She was a very beautiful woman. She wasn’t too Black for people,” says Haitian-Canadian academic and archivist Frantz Voltaire in Simply Johanne, a documentary about Johanne Harrelle, the first Black fashion model to rise to prominence in Canada in the 1950s.

Nadine Valcin’s film about the renegade model/actress, who passed away in 1994, paints an intriguing picture of a complicated and mostly-forgotten woman. Abandoned at an orphanage in Montreal, Johanne overcame her difficult childhood and grew up to make a mark on the Quebec fashion scene at a time when there were no women of colour modelling high-end clothing.

Valcin stitches together a rich tapestry of Johanne’s life, with a mix of archival footage from fashion campaigns, stylized re-enactments, narrations from her autobiography, and interview clips. The documentary also features footage from films in which Johanne appeared, most significantly the 1963 film À tout prendre directed by Claude Jutra, her former lover. An auto-fictional retelling of their relationship, the film—apparently the first in North America to show a Black woman in bed with a white man—made waves.

Featuring interviews with her family as well as prominent creatives and intellectuals of that time, the film attempts to understand an enigmatic woman who never quite came to terms with her childhood trauma. Despite the many tragedies of her life, Johanne was a bold and provocative woman ahead of her time, who changed the landscape of fashion and film in Canada.

— Pahull Bains