Rettet Raffi! (2015)

Eight-year-old Sammy lives in Hamburg with his sister Molly and their mother. His father left the family because he needed a break and is working in Afghanistan. Sammy misses him and desperately wishes he would come back to his family. One day, Sammy’s hamster Raffi falls ill and needs an operation. On the way home after the operation, the family stops to buy pizza, and their car—with Raffi inside—is stolen by the gangster Rocky, who has just been released from prison and picked up there by his girlfriend Miranda. They don’t get far before they run out of gas. Miranda takes Raffi home with her, but Rocky is annoyed by the animal, so he leaves him outside the house. Without his mother’s knowledge, Sammy sets off to look for Raffi and finds the car the thieves abandoned beneath the Köhlbrand Bridge. Inside, he finds Rocky’s prison release papers, which list Miranda’s address. When he arrives there, the apartment door is open, and he sees Raffi’s cage inside. Rocky catches him, however, and claims he found the empty cage in the trash before throwing Sammy out of the apartment. Still, Rocky’s interest in Raffi has been piqued: Sammy has explained that the hamster used to sniff out his father’s cigarettes, and Rocky is looking for smuggled cigarettes that he hid in three shipping containers before going to prison. The containers have since disappeared. Rocky watches Sammy spot Raffi, who, after escaping from a cat, is drifting down the Elbe on a wooden board. The boy tries to rescue the hamster by rowing after him on a pontoon. Raffi makes it to the riverbank and climbs onto a restaurant boat, while Sammy is almost run over by a container ship but is rescued at the last moment by the DLRG. At the restaurant, Sammy learns that the cook caught Raffi and gave him to his brother Lin, who works as a prop master at Studio Hamburg on the TV show Tommy Which Door, where hamsters run through various doors and influence how the show unfolds. Rocky, who has been eavesdropping on them, gets to the studio before Sammy and steals Raffi again. He equips the hamster with a miniature camera and sends him into the false floors of the containers, which are now being used as a prop-storage area for Tommy Which Door, hoping to find his cigarettes. But the hamster bites through the camera cable and escapes. Lin finds him in a container and returns him to Sammy, who is a guest on Tommy Which Door with his family. When the smuggled cigarettes found by customs in the container floors are about to be burned on the TV show, Rocky tries to stop it. He takes a wheel loader and loads the cigarettes into its bucket, with Raffi ending up in there too. As Rocky tries to drive off the studio grounds, Sammy stands in his way. Before Rocky can run the boy over, Raffi bites through a cable on the wheel loader, bringing it to a stop. Just as Rocky is about to kill Raffi in a rage, Sammy’s father knocks him out. He has returned to Germany, seen his son on television, and come to the studio. Three months later, Sammy’s family is back together, and Raffi, who is female, has had four babies—the father is one of the other hamsters from Tommy Which Door.