Pim de la Parra

Date of birth
04-01-1940

Biography

Pim de la Parra is a Surinamese-Dutch filmmaker and producer. He came to the Netherlands and started studying at the Film Academy in 1960. In 1963 he co-founded the film magazine Skoop with Wim Verstappen, Nikolai van der Heyde and Gied Jaspars. For much of his career he would form an inseparable duo with Verstappen, known simply as Pim and Wim. They started up their own production company, called Scorpio Films. Scorpio released four films in 1965, including De la Parra's Aaah… Tamara and Jongens jongens wat een meid, two light-hearted and primarily improvised short films. Scorpio Films made a name for itself with a quick and unprecedentedly cheap way of working. After a number of other short films, including Heart Beat Fresco and Joop, 1970 saw the release of De la Parra's first feature film, Rubia's Jungle.

With the Scorpio production Blue Movie, which came out the following year, Pim and Wim took on a new tack. It was a shamelessly commercial film, which, incidentally was the start of the end of the film censorship board in the Netherlands. Once the film had been approved for screening, it was unusually successful. De la Parra's relatively explicit film Frank & Eva was also approved for screening in 1973 after a bit of trouble, and was also well attended. Despite the fact that these successes brought in plenty of income, Scorpio Films ran into financial problems in 1976, due to De la Parra's magnum opus Wan Pipel, the first feature film to be shot in the newly independent Suriname. The film cost more than expected to make and the audiences weren't interested: Scorpio Films went bankrupt and De la Parra and Verstappen went their separate ways.

De la Parra lived for a few years on Aruba but returned to the Netherlands, where he made a series of low-budget 'minimal movies' in the mid-1980s, such as Paul Chevrolet en de ultieme hallucinatie.Starting at the end of the 1980s he made many of these with Paul Ruven. In 1995 he released his his 'farewell film' in this genre, De droom van een schaduw. After that, De la Parra returned to Suriname, where he helped with starting up the Fundasi de Surinaamse Film Academie in 2005. The first feature film from the academy Het geheim van de Saramaccarivier, was released in 2007.

filmography

  1. 1966
    Sound, Producer, Script writer
  2. 1966
    Producer, Script writer
  3. 1969
    Producer, Script writer
  4. 1969
    Director, Script writer
  5. 1970
    Director, Script writer
  6. 1971
    Camera, Producer
  7. 1972
    Production advice
  8. 1972
    Producer
  9. 1973
    Director, Script writer
  10. 1974
    Actor, Producer
    Xander
  11. 1974
    Producer
  12. 1975
    Actor, Producer
  13. 1975
    Director, Script writer

more information

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