One People (1976)
Few national cinemas have as particular a backstory as Suriname's, and One People sits at the very centre of it. The film arrived in 1976, the year after Suriname formally gained independence from the Netherlands, and that timing is no accident. The country's departure from the Dutch Kingdom was a long-negotiated affair, and it left behind a layered society built from centuries of plantation labour, migration, and colonial administration: Afro-Surinamese, Hindustani, Javanese, Indigenous, and European communities living in proximity but not always in concert. The film's own tagline ("One was black. One was white. One was brown.") signals its intentions plainly enough, and the racial and cultural tensions it depicts were fresh, unresolved, and very much in the news at the time of release. For a parallel from elsewhere in the post-colonial world, you might think of some of the mid-seventies African productions reviewed on this blog, including our look at Under the Sign of Voodoo, another film that used the genre drama framework to carry considerable cultural freight. Surinamese cinema of this era is rarely seen outside the region, which makes One People a genuinely rare document regardless of its artistic merits.
The director, Pim de la Parra, was himself a product of the Dutch-Surinamese world the film portrays. Born in Paramaribo and educated in the Netherlands, he had already made a name for himself in Dutch exploitation and counter-culture cinema during the late sixties and early seventies, often working alongside Wim Verstappen. One People represented a deliberate pivot: a more politically charged, personally rooted project, produced with support from the Nederlands Fonds voor de Film and his own Scorpio Films outfit. Shooting on 16mm kept costs manageable and gave the film a textural, documentary-adjacent quality that suits the Surinamese setting rather well. The cast reflects the film's ambitions about representing multiple communities. Borger Breeveld leads as Roy, the returning student caught between worlds, and Diana Gangaram Panday, herself of Hindustani-Surinamese background, plays the local woman who draws him back into a life he had half-abandoned. Willeke van Ammelrooy, one of the better-known faces in Dutch cinema of the period, takes the role of Roy's Amsterdam girlfriend, and her presence adds a degree of commercial familiarity to what is otherwise a distinctly regional production. You can see a similar dynamic at work in films like She's Gotta Have It, where a low-budget, culturally specific project uses its constraints as a creative asset rather than an obstacle.
The film's subject matter, a man pulled between his adopted European life and the newly independent homeland he left behind, gave de la Parra the chance to dramatise questions that were genuinely urgent for the Surinamese diaspora in 1976. Many thousands of Surinamese had emigrated to the Netherlands before and during independence, and the question of where one belonged, culturally, romantically, politically, was anything but abstract. Thematically, One People shares territory with other films on this blog that sit at the crossroads of personal drama and collective history, among them the Bosnian war portrait Quo Vadis, Aida? and, closer to home for Surinamese viewers, the folkloric anthology Sranan Folktales: Arki Den Bigi Sma, which draws on the same cultural wellspring from a very different angle.
There’s a distinct, sun-drenched charm to the 16mm aesthetic of 1970s cinema, and Pim de la Parra’s 1976 drama One People captures that era’s visual texture perfectly. I have a real soft spot for that old film style, and watching this picture is like stepping into a vibrant, if slightly faded, time capsule of Suriname on the cusp of its independence from the Netherlands.
The premise is immediately compelling: Roy, a man who has built a comfortable life in Holland, returns to his homeland to visit his dying mother, bringing with him his Dutch girlfriend and a suitcase full of unexamined colonial baggage.
However, the film quickly stumbles over its own narrative ambitions. As Roy settles back into the rhythms of his home country, he crosses paths with a local Hindustani woman and promptly begins an affair, betraying the partner he brought with him. Here is where the movie makes a rather baffling creative choice. The political messaging is so overt and heavy-handed that it actively warps the protagonist’s character. Instead of a nuanced exploration of a man torn between two worlds, Roy is reduced to an unlikeable swine, making it incredibly difficult to invest in his personal journey or feel any sympathy for his dilemmas.
It’s a shame, really, because the foundational setup has the makings of a brilliant family drama, strongly reminiscent in its thematic weight of Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley. Both films grapple with the complex, messy realities of post-colonial identity and the magnetic pull of ancestral roots. But where Sugar Cacane Alley grounds its politics in deeply empathetic character work, One People allows its ideological agenda to completely overshadow the human element. You find yourself constantly frustrated by Roy’s decisions, wishing the script would grant him a shred of self-awareness or moral grounding.
One People is a visually striking, historically fascinating slice of Surinamese cinema that is held back by a deeply flawed central character. Pim de la Parra deserves fair play for documenting such a pivotal moment in his country’s history with such authentic, evocative cinematography. It’s a decent, watch if you can look past the protagonist’s infuriating behaviour, serving as a compelling, if uneven, snapshot of a nation finding its footing.
One People is a polished but uneven film that repays the effort of tracking it down, particularly for anyone interested in Dutch colonial history or the broader story of post-colonial cinema. Its documentary value, as a record of Paramaribo in the year of independence, is arguably greater than its value as a drama, and de la Parra's camera is clearly in love with the country in a way the screenplay occasionally forgets to be. The film sits in an awkward middle ground, too ideological to work purely as romance, too personal to function as polemic, and yet there is something genuinely affecting about a filmmaker returning to his homeland and trying to capture it before the moment passes. Some films matter more for what they preserve than for what they invent. One People is, quietly, one of them.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1976 | Watched: 2026-07-15
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for One People (1976) on YouTube
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