In contemporary Europe challenged by unprecedented migratory flows, a growing urgency to preserve national identity burns not only along borders but also inside, forcing minorities into ghettos. Roma, Sinti and Gypsy communities count more than 11 million people, still yet systematically discriminated. 

Stolipinovo, Plovdiv, Bulgaria, is Europe’s biggest Gypsy ghetto. Formerly ordinary district during communism, Stolipinovo was turned into a ghetto with the event of democracy and the privatisation of industries which caused the Gypsies to lose their jobs for racial discrimination. Job or education opportunities are out of reach. 80.000 inhabitants have Turkish and Muslim cultural roots. 
In contrast with a strong community-based social structure and system of traditions, the inhabitants of Stolipinovo are forced to live in squalid decay and daily social, housing, economic, health emergency. Stolipinovo is a portrait of systematic discrimination in Europe in our century.

As the world started being disrupted with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in February 2020, engineer Elias Macke, based in his workshop in Leipzig, Germany, where he lives onboard his truck, decided to turn a period of social isolation and lost connections into the realisation of a long dreamt project: the construction from scratch of a functioning submarine. With determination from the beginning, endless nights of mechanical and nautical studies and the spirit of a genius, Macke put together industrial scrap and spare parts, recycled and new materials into a completely self-projected and self-built submarine, that he called “Markus Heller”, in memory of a lost beloved one. Through restless months of construction, welding, assembling, research, and testing, in a self-built pool first and in a lake then, the “Markus Heller”, built uniquely for recreational and self-satisfactory reasons, is a wonder that makes the impossible possible, that brings megalomania into everyday life.