https://youtu.be/DKrYuKlsJkI

I think this has something to do with the movie "Im Schneeland" that was shot in Japan by the same director that same year.

https://www.arsenal-berlin.de/en/cinema/programm-archive/2011/film-series/filmdocument-4

"Settele shot his graduation film IM SCHNEELANDin the Japanese prefecture of Niigata, whose mountain ranges are some of the most snowy regions of the earth. Because of its isolated location on the island of Honshu's western coast, independent lifestyle and production methods emerged that were in part preserved into the 1990s. These are what Settele is most interested in. The attentive, unpretentious visual language and the dense voiceover create a cinematographic expedition bound by a tangible enthusiasm for everything that is handmade but at the same time always open for smaller and bigger digressions. A passage which traces the biography of the Buddhist monk and poet Ryōkan almost becomes a film in a film."

https://www.filmblatt.de/2016/09/12/das-filmschaffen-von-stephan-settele-im-schneeland-1994