LEWISTON — An initiative aimed at giving area moviemakers a place to show their movies and talk about them — Maine Microcinema — is growing.

Between 30 and 50 people have been filling She Doesn’t Like Guthries restaurant in downtown Lewiston on the monthly movie nights, organizers Craig Saddlemire and Colin Kelley said.

Over the next two months, a pair of higher profile, feature-length documentaries will be featured without admission fees.

On Feb. 21, the movie “Betting the Farm,” about a group of Maine dairy farmers creating their own milk company, will be shown. And March 14, a movie about an attempt to restart a Prospect Harbor cannery, “Downeast,” will be screened. Both are scheduled for 7:30 p.m.

“This is just a collaboration between myself and a few other video-makers trying to create a free and open venue for movies that have a connection to Maine,” said Saddlemire, who also serves on the Lewiston City Council.

After each 7:30 p.m. showing, a question-and-answer session will follow.

The makers of “Downeast,” David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, plan to attend and talk about their film. And farmers from “Betting the Farm” will likely answer questions about their project, Saddlemire and Kelley said.

The aim of the events is to be warm, intimate and inquisitive.

Saddlemire and Kelley started showing movies at Guthries last year. The restaurant was a venue in the 2012 Lewiston-Auburn Film Festival, for which Kelley is the technical director.

It seemed a natural spot to show some homegrown movies, said Saddlemire, who has made several short films.

“It’s a cozy intimate environment that I think is a nice way to experience a movie.

Part of that is the relaxed venue, Saddlemire said. It doesn’t have a movie theater’s structure, with hundreds of seats all facing in one direction. People can see each other and when the movie’s over, they can have a comfortable conversation.

“As an independent filmmaker, I’ve done little tours around New England,” Saddlemire said. “That kind of intimate showing is my favorite, when I work with the organizer and they put their heart and soul into turning people out to see my work and have a discussion with me about it.”

“The organizers have all pitched in our own money to get a good projector set up there,” Saddlemire said. Rather than waiting for someone to build a big, expensive movie theater for us to show our work in, we just started doing it ourselves.”

They began titling it “Maine Microcinema” last fall.

In most cases, there would be little opportunity to see these films any other way, said Kelley, who works at Bates College as a digital media specialist.

The ability to host question-and-answer sessions takes away some of the passivity of movie watching, he said.

“It’s more like attending a gallery opening,” Kelley said.

It introduces people to artists they might never hear about.

For the makers of “Downeast,” that may be changing. The team has been getting notoriety for another project, titled “Girl Model.” That documentary followed a talent scout on a search for teen models in Siberia. It watched the girls as they went to work in Japan.

The film has been the subject of stories on National Public Radio and in the New York Times.

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