Eating together with chopsticks, forks, or cheese sandwiches: Heinz Toku-Zen Anneser and his students practice Buddhist rituals without pretension. In his study, which is as precisely measured as it is poetic, Thomas Köhling observes the daily routines of this small, quiet group in the German provinces and finds appealingly bizarre moments when Eastern religion and western culture overlap. The sky above the Velux window is the same as above Mount Fuji.

Silesia: a contested region marked by migrations. Animosities between the peoples have a long tradition here, not only since the Second World War. But the National Socialist tyranny left clear lesions behind. The director’s grandfather comes from this region, was the organist in a church in Krasiejów – a place which was once also called Krascheow and, for a while, Schönhorst.

The filmmaker Juliane Henrich – or more precisely, her alter ego, the writer Nannina Matz – sets out in search of her family history. What she finds are bizarre ways of representing the history of humanity – and the history of earth. She comes across all kinds of traces of dinosaurs. Some may only be made of plastic, but others are not: A certain species of this genus, whose fossils were found in Silesia, was christened “Silesaurus opolensis” by the Polish palaeontologist Jerzy Dzik. That’s why there is a Dinosaur Park in Krasiejów. And a local museum, of course. But also many people with different individual memories. They do not necessarily lead to ground-breaking discoveries regarding the looked-for family past, but they broaden the view: of the complex history of this region and the way it is thought together, represented and codified.