ANPPim of La Parra
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 01:04
Director Pim de la Parra passed away on Friday at the age of 84 after a short illness in Paramaribo. His family reports that he passed away in the presence of his two daughters, Bodil and Nina.
His family describes him in the obituary as the ‘enfant terrible’ of Dutch film. He made dozens of films, including his big breakthrough in 1971, the erotic film Blue MovieThe film about a man who wants to catch up on what he missed after his release from prison attracted more than two million people and is still in the top 5 of most visited Dutch films.
De la Parra’s film Wan Pipel (1976) is considered one of the most important Surinamese feature films. He also made films such as Paul Chevrolet and the Ultimate Hallucination, Lost in Amsterdam in The Night of the Wild Donkeys.
Minimal movies
De la Parra was considered a great innovator in the Dutch film world in the sixties. He opted for a looser and more realistic style than people were used to here, influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague with directors such as Godard and Truffaut.
“They just filmed on the street, in the middle of life. That was inspiring. And because handheld cameras came onto the market and the negative was increasingly able to capture natural light, we were able to do that too,” he once explained to the Filmkrant.
It eventually led to a method that he minimal movies called: uncontrived feature films that were shot on a minimal budget in an extremely short time to capture the spontaneity of the project. His working method inspired many other filmmakers: for example, Martin Scorsese was a regular house guest at De la Parra’s before his own breakthrough in the 1960s.
‘Own film universe’
The Dutch Film Academy characterized all of De la Parra’s contributions to the sector as “a separate film universe that was diametrically opposed to existing production structures”. For example, after completing his studies at the Film Academy in 1963, he founded the production company Scorpio with Wim Verstappen and started the film magazine Skoop with him and other fellow students.
The filmmaker received a special award for his oeuvre at the Dutch Film Festival in Utrecht in 1991. In 2021, he was appointed Officer in the Honorary Order of the Yellow Star in Suriname. A film about the life of Pim de la Parra was made in 2010, Parradox.
“The Dutch film world would have looked very different without director Pim de la Parra,” wrote the Film newspaper about his life in honor of his 80th birthday.
