In memoriam Parra de la Pim (1940-2024)

Enfant terrible and bon vivant

Text Armand Snijders – Image Iwan Brave

Filmmaker, columnist and bon vivant Pim de la Parra died Friday at the age of 84. A look back at the turbulent life of the director of the iconic classic ‘Wan Pipel’, with which generations of Surinamese grew up. But who was also the enfant terrible of the Dutch film world for a long time.

When Wim Verstappen died in 2004 at the age of 67, Pim was amazed at how much attention this news received. And because he and Verstappen had achieved great success in the film industry and had done groundbreaking work, the media all wanted his reaction as well. That was the reason he wondered to me at the time what people would write and say about him if he had “crossed over. And whether that would be anywhere near the truth. Now, twenty years later, I feel that he is watching over my shoulder from above to see if I am living up to his expectations.

I have experienced only a quarter of his passes on earth – particularly from 1996 – so it will not be a complete picture. In that year, Pim, who was the son of a renowned druggist, returned to his native Suriname where he moved into his parents’ home, on Costerstraat, to care for his dying father, the widely known druggist.

Although he sincerely wanted to accompany his father in the leaden last months of his life, his stay in the Netherlands had ended in failure. So that he had to close the door there was not really a punishment.

True, with Verstappen he had achieved enormous success and had become a millionaire, but because of misguided investments, a rough lifestyle with cocaine, alcohol and other pleasures, plus failed film, he became as poor as a church rat and was declared bankrupt. He never really regretted that, however.

Scorpio Films

He had ended up in the Netherlands in the early 1960s to study at the Dutch Film Academy. This was very much against the wishes of his father, who would have preferred that Pim, who had grown up among the drugstore shelves, had taken over his business.

But the sonling went in a completely different direction and soon turned the film world in the Netherlands upside down. With Verstappen, he founded Scorpio Films, and they rapidly directed and produced films together, with which the duo became known as “Pim & Wim.

They shocked the conservative Netherlands in 1971 by releasing the first Dutch soft-porn film ‘Blue Movie’, which was simply shown in cinemas. As a result, Pim became the enfant terrible of the Netherlands. But shame or not, nearly three million curious people did go to see the film, or nearly a quarter of the population at the time. The blockbuster earned the makers millions. But after that, new successes mainly failed to materialize.

Wan Pipel

The last joint project with Verstappen was the film “Dakota” (1984) with star actress Monique van der Ven. The realization of that film, which was largely shot on Curaçao, in itself provided a script for a new film: tensions between director Wim and producer Pim reached a boiling point, while Van der Ven left prematurely after a quarrel broke out over the relationship she had on set with cameraman Jan de Bont, who was subsequently fired.

Later, once the film was finished, it could count on few positive reviews, after which Pim and Wim each went their separate ways. Pim reached his artistic peak with the making of ‘Wan Pipel’, (1976) starring, among others, Borger Breeveld and Willeke van Ammelrooy. A fine work of art about the complicated ethnic relations in Suriname.

A film that also contributed to its failure because it did not really draw full theaters. But almost half a century after the fact, it is still a frequently screened classic, and one of the most frequently played Surinamese role-playing films in movie houses and at festivals.

Oriental lifestyles

He himself was only too proud of this film, about which he wrote to me in 2014: “At the age of thirty, I was sure I would change the world, and with the film ‘Wan Pipel’ I thought I had accomplished that. But in the forty years since the release of that film, it has dawned on me painfully acutely that with a film, or with a book, or with any other artistic expression, you can change virtually nothing. It only seems that way. And we love to fool ourselves so much’.

It was one of the many hundreds of e-mail messages I have had from him over the past few years, which by default began with “Aloha dear dear Armand,” after which he usually surprised with propositions based on philosophies he drew mainly from the Eastern ways of life he was interested in.

Those wisdoms, he said, also helped him come to terms with the dramatic suicide of his son Pimm Jal in 2002. His two other children, daughters Bodil and Nina, incidentally followed in their father’s artistic footsteps: Bodil as an actress and playwright and Nina as a theater producer.

Columnist de Ware Tijd

Financially, Pim got back on his feet after 2000, partly because he received an AOW payment from the Netherlands. He sold the historic building on Costerstraat (which was demolished) and moved to Prins Hendrikstraat, where he lived until his death. For years he was a columnist for de Ware Tijd and Parbode, where he not infrequently drove the editors to despair because of his lamentations about futilities that would have been changed in his text.

Until 2020, he stopped by the editors on his bicycle every week to pick up his paper and have a chat. Until the corona pandemic threw a spanner in the works. At one point he had to give up his bicycle because his declining health made it unacceptable. But the stream of e-mails kept coming. Until that too became more and more difficult.

Finally the inevitable happened to him. But he had been preparing for it for years. A long time ago I had to promise him to use a quote from his autobiographical novel Prins Pim, Overdenkingen van een Levensgenieter (Prince Pim, reflections of an Epicurean), which was published in 1978: “Pim de la Parra was here, he died while working. His work was making films and loving them. He salutes you…’