Creepy in St. Pauli's former Chinese quarter

I travelled quite a lot to festivals with my graduation film Raju and was also in Shanghai, among other places. The guest supervisor was an ethnologist and had just completed a doctoral thesis on the different Chinese neighbourhoods in Europe. She also travelled to Hamburg to visit the St. Pauli district - that's how we got talking. As a native of Hamburg, I had never heard of it myself. But it's an incredibly exciting story that has been completely unresolved. There are very few sources - so researching it is not easy. Around 130 Chinese were arrested there at the end of the Second World War and sent to labour camps. In the 1950s there were trials about the case and the city of Hamburg said that it was a police action. For this reason, it was never recognised as a racist crime and was ultimately not dealt with. At least there is a memorial plaque in Schmuckstraße - but even for this, the St. Pauli Archive has to pay rent.

The film festival in Shanghai was five years ago. When NDR, FFHSH and nordmedia announced the Nordlichter funding programme with a focus on "Mystery" in 2015, I really wanted to tell a ghost house story in Hamburg. The proper research and further development then took around a year.

I was actually making my second mystery or horror film. I already made a slasher film in 2012 with Radio Silence - with the same Director of Photography and editor as for Tian. I really like to combine a relevant narrative with a strong genre.

If there is one genre that is particularly close to the audience, it is certainly the mystery or horror genre, as it works with primal instincts such as fear, hope, longing or insecurity - the viewer is literally sucked into the film and introduced to a topic without a raised index finger.
The genre is about throwing protagonists into a situation in which they are completely overwhelmed - and then observing how they deal with it, how they fight, how they behave as people and how they grow. It's a really nice genre for a character study, where you can't work very visually with costumes and camera angles. In short: it's great fun to make a scary film.

We tell a fictional story against the backdrop of Hamburg's historic Chinese quarter. Our house in the film is inhabited by an old man who lived through the terrible times as a child - and that is already the first fiction.

You can still visit the Hongkong Bar on Hamburger Berg today. It was founded by one of the survivors and his daughter Marietta is still the landlady. Unfortunately, almost everything else was bombed away. We then looked for old facades for the flashback sequences in other places, such as Wexstraße. Incidentally, the haunted house from our story is actually the Tai Oasis in Große Freiheit. We didn't shoot in the Tai Oasis, of course, but the exterior shots were filmed there.

The word comes from the Chinese and means heaven - but it also stands for a Chinese religious concept. Heaven and the underworld represent ying and yang. The term Tian is an amalgamation of philosophical, religious and traditional Chinese elements.