Helena Zengel

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 – 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 filming of a 2016 novel of the same title, by Canadian-American writer Paulette Jiles, Zengel plays a 10-year old German orphan, “Johanna Leonberger,” alongside of Tom Hanks in the role of 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.

Helena Zengel (* June 10, 2008 in Berlin) is a German child actress.