The winner of 2023 LUX Audience Award is announced on 27 June in a ceremony at the European Parliament’s hemicycle in Brussels. Before the ceremony, Sunnyi Melles, actress from “Triangle of Sadness” one of the 5 nominated films answers to an interview.

Brussels

statement

LUX European Audience Film Award 2023 (T)

LUX Audience Award 2023 - Statements by finalists: Sunnyi Melles, actress from “Triangle of Sadness”

https://api.multimedia.europarl.europa.eu/documents/20125/71114040/1687790240121_I243048Chapters%5BSD-EN%5D.srt

SOUNDBITE (English), Sunnyi Melles, actress from "The Triangle of Sadness" We've been excellent. He showed everybody from a different society, but at the end, everybody wants to have the power. Everybody wants to have the money. Everybody wants to have this best thing. So everybody is equal. I say this sentence also as Vera, but nobody will be judged. A good one is also an evil. The bad one is also a good one. So the colors, black and white, doesn't exist.

SOUNDBITE (English), Sunnyi Melles, actress from "The Triangle of Sadness" Everybody, and you as an the audience, you feel for both and you suffer and you laugh for all the the personality that we are playing for the Philippines, for American, for English... So I love that idea that we are all over the world in one little island, or the yacht, and we have much problems, but at the end we are all equal. And so we have the hope to get better people.

SOUNDBITE (English), Sunnyi Melles, actress from "The Triangle of Sadness" And you need a kind of poetic kind of humor. Otherwise, without humor, you can't change, you can't survive. And it is really, the film, is very strong. But I had my first moment in Cannes, in the Lumiere, with 2700 people. And the reaction was, until now, more than 4 million people saw this film in the cinema. Vive la cinema. The same reaction. And that's for me, a magic. It's a magic moment.

SOUNDBITE (English), Sunnyi Melles, actress from "The Triangle of Sadness" And I do not like, as an actress to see rushes, because I'm on stage also and I don't want to see myself. But I was in a in the movie, in this movie, 20 times, and it was always the same reaction. I never had that before. So it's even Corona. It's a big gift to Ruben Östlund who wrote it and to my colleagues and the team to make such a great film and to be a little part of that.

SOUNDBITE (English), Sunnyi Melles, actress from "The Triangle of Sadness" And you have to be very true. My mother and my father escaped from Hungarian. I was stateless, 15 years without passports, so I know a lot of countries have no the possibility to say what they think of the government.

SOUNDBITE (English), Sunnyi Melles, actress from "The Triangle of Sadness" So if you are nominated from the from the Parliament, the European Parliament, if you have a support, who gives not just the honor and the famous. So I think it's also a support of politician and this it was the first time I was here and inhaled democracy. That's the reason my mother left Hungarian. She wants to fight for that. So you are not always able to do it.

SOUNDBITE (English), Sunnyi Melles, actress from "The Triangle of Sadness" How to do as an actress? You need a film. You need directors all that stuff. But now, I'm not only passive. I can do my own film. I can talk. I will look that I'm coming back and to support other films and give a voice to those films who are not able to say what they are feeling because the government is not. Russia and Iran. I saw Persian version. A lot of women wants to get free of that debt.

SOUNDBITE (English), Sunnyi Melles, actress from "The Triangle of Sadness" So we have a voice here. I found a new voice and my voice is stronger not only for my mother and my father's side. This is a wonderful gift, but  we have to act. Act not as an actress but to act also for the other to be supported.