Helena Zengel (born 10 June 2008) is a German child actress.Helena
Zengel was born and grew up in Berlin and began her acting career at
the age of five in a music video for the Berlin Alternative rock band
Abby. Her first main role in a film, at the age of eight, was in a
drama film, Die Tochter (The Daughter), which was written and directed
by Mascha Schilinski and shown at the Berlinale 2017. She also had
small parts in two episodes of a German TV series, Die Spezialisten
â€" Im Namen der Opfer. In the drama film System Crasher, written and
directed by Nora Fingscheidt, which premiered in Februar 2019 at the
Berlinale, Zengel plays the leading role of "Benni", an aggressive and
traumatised nine-year old. In April 2020 she won German Film Prize for
Best Actress.After System Crasher won a number of international
awards, Zengel was cast by Universal Pictures to play a leading role
in the Western film News of the World directed by the British film
director Paul Greengrass. In this adaptation of the 2016 novel of the
same name by Canadian-American writer Paulette Jiles, Zengel plays a
10-year-old German orphan named Johanna Leonberger, while Tom Hanks
stars as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd. Returned to a settlement in
Northern Texas in 1870 after living four years as the adopted daughter
in a tribe of Kiowa, Johanna is to be driven across lawless Texan
territory by the kindly traveller Kidd to rejoin her German relatives
near San Antonio. The film is scheduled to be released in late 2020.
Zengel was born and grew up in Berlin and began her acting career at
the age of five in a music video for the Berlin Alternative rock band
Abby. Her first main role in a film, at the age of eight, was in a
drama film, Die Tochter (The Daughter), which was written and directed
by Mascha Schilinski and shown at the Berlinale 2017. She also had
small parts in two episodes of a German TV series, Die Spezialisten
â€" Im Namen der Opfer. In the drama film System Crasher, written and
directed by Nora Fingscheidt, which premiered in Februar 2019 at the
Berlinale, Zengel plays the leading role of "Benni", an aggressive and
traumatised nine-year old. In April 2020 she won German Film Prize for
Best Actress.After System Crasher won a number of international
awards, Zengel was cast by Universal Pictures to play a leading role
in the Western film News of the World directed by the British film
director Paul Greengrass. In this adaptation of the 2016 novel of the
same name by Canadian-American writer Paulette Jiles, Zengel plays a
10-year-old German orphan named Johanna Leonberger, while Tom Hanks
stars as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd. Returned to a settlement in
Northern Texas in 1870 after living four years as the adopted daughter
in a tribe of Kiowa, Johanna is to be driven across lawless Texan
territory by the kindly traveller Kidd to rejoin her German relatives
near San Antonio. The film is scheduled to be released in late 2020.
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