Playing with Fire

Jackson Martini (Evgenii Galkin) was born in Moscow, and is of Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish descent, a direct descendant of Russian Biryukov noble family, particularly of Pavel Biryukov who was a close friend and a personal biographer of Leo Tolstoy.

"I feel like coming from a family with such close ties to the greatest genius of Russian dramatic literature certainly shaped my own understanding of what my own life as a part of that family could lead me to become. I probably was always destined to be some kind of an author of something, I feel I would have been a real sad panda without this in my life..."

At the age of 17 immigrated to Czech Republic to study Finance under his parents' provision, however continued to follow his true passion in filmmaking producing various independent works. This passion led to his later immigration to the United States at the age of 21 to pursue a degree in Film Production in American University, and, later (and as of right now) in Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD).

Before his immigration to the United States, his Russia-based production company, Zellmonn Company, produced and published a number of short films, fake trailers and music videos on their YouTube channel. Since 2019 Zellmonn Company has worked closely with one of the biggest TV and internet celebrities in Russia, an opposition-leaning historian by the name of Evgenii Ponasenkov. This cooperation employed Jackson and his colleagues to work on numerous projects, most notably on an interview with the greatest opera singer of all time, Placido Domingo, which was conducted in 2021 in the Bolshoi theater.