Tian - Das Geheimnis der Schmuckstraße (2017)

Michael Winter moves back from Dubai to Hamburg with his wife, Friederike, and their daughter, Selma, after the successful civil engineer loses his job and starts looking for a new challenge. His father-in-law, Heinrich, has found them an apartment in an old building on Schmuckstraße in St. Pauli, right next door to his own. It has been empty for many years, ever since its former tenant, a Chinese woman, died. The apartment is furnished with old furniture; the wallpaper is peeling in places, and a Chinese character is displayed on one wall. Their daughter Selma begins behaving strangely. She talks to imaginary friends and suddenly suffers an epileptic seizure at school. Friederike seems to be slipping into a schizophrenic episode and tries to investigate the story of the apartment’s former occupant. As a result, Michael has to take care of Selma almost by himself. He refuses to believe that there might be ghosts in the apartment. When Friederike suddenly disappears, Michael has to investigate on his own. Heinrich does not want to tell him anything, and instead tells Michael not to meddle in old matters and that he is not welcome here. The Chinese owner of a bar tells Michael something about the history of Hamburg’s Chinatown. Chinese people settled around Schmuckstraße and ran businesses there, including laundries and restaurants. In 1944, the Gestapo cleared the neighborhood as part of the “Chinesenaktion” (Chinese Action) and arrested many Chinese people; some later died as a result of abuse and forced labor. Michael confronts Heinrich again. Heinrich tells him that, as a child, he was friends with the Chinese children and that they used to hide them in the cellar during raids. When the Gestapo searched the neighborhood, Heinrich was supposed to get his friends to safety through a tunnel beneath the street. But, out of fear, he fled. When the Gestapo found the children in the cellar, they simply locked them down there and left them to suffocate. Michael sets out to find the secret tunnel, which he eventually discovers with Selma. He is able to open the hatch, unlike Heinrich during the war, and finds Friederike lying on the ground. By the time Michael reaches her, she is dying. Selma returns a child’s stuffed animal to the child’s ghost; she had found it in the apartment. Friederike then opens her eyes. A year later, Michael is working again as a civil engineer at Hamburg Airport. He visits a memorial stone with Friederike and Selma, commemorating the events on Schmuckstraße in 1944.