Austin filmmaker a semi-finalist in Netflix competition

Austinite Robbie Pickering achieved a semi-finalist position in the "Find Your Voice" film competition hosted by Netflix and Film independent. His film, Natural Selection, is about a conservative woman who discovers that her dying husband has been secretly donating to a sperm bank for the past 23 years. She seeks out his oldest biological child, only to discover that he's a foul-mouthed ne'er-do-well with a mullet played by DJ Qualls. Pickering, a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and USC's Graduate Screenwriting Program, scored big by landing one of the ten semi-finalist positions, beating out thousands of other applicants.

The initial round of applicants were judged by an industry panel, including Josh Brolin, Dustin Lance Black, Dan Jinks, and Bruce Cohen - incidentally, all affiliated with the 2008 movie Milk, which received accolades at the Film Independent Spirit Awards - as well as John Sayles and Columbia Pictures executive Stephanie Allain. 

The current round of the competition requires the general public to access the competition website, watch clips of the ten semi-finalist's films, and rate them from one to five stars. 

The competition hopes to find the "next great independent filmmaker," a goal that the non-profit organization Film Independent has held continuously for close to 30 years. Film Independent started as a collection of filmmakers discussing ways to increase resources for independent filmmaking, and now offers grants and fellowships for a variety of projects, as well as sponsoring the Los Angeles Film Festival and the Spirit Awards. For Netflix, this competition explores new ways to find competitive distribution in an industry that is increasingly going digital.

The filmmaker who wins the competition will receive a $150,000 production grant, as well as another $200,000 worth of production resources. If he wins, Pickering plans to shoot his feature film here in Texas.