Flick Pick

Hooray for the altruists and art lovers at Madstone Theaters. Recognizing that distribution can be a nightmare for young and/or unknown indie filmmakers, the art-house chain is showing six promising new films, through May and June, that have played the festival circuit but haven't yet attracted distributors. In Denver, Madstone's Film Forward Series opens Thursday, May 1, with Derek Simonds's Seven and a Match, a serio-comic survey of affection and friendship among a group of twenty-somethings wrestling with the demands of adulthood, and Side Streets, which weaves together five spirited urban stories, each set in a different borough of New York City on the same day. The director is New York-based newcomer Tony Gerber, who co-wrote the screenplay with his wife, playwright Lynn Nottage.

A scene from Seven and a Match.

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More About

• J.T. Petty
• Derek Simonds
• Tony Gerber
• Lynn Nottage
• New York University

The series will change gears on May 15, when twenty-year-old J.T. Petty's Soft for Digging and Mia Trachinger's Bunny make their debuts. The former, an NYU film-studies thesis with a budget of just $6,000, is a shocker that's being compared to The Blair Witch Project; the latter is a tale of exile and emotional resettlement in the wake of civil war in an unnamed Eastern European nation. Trachinger's cast members, recruited in Los Angeles, are all actual U.S. immigrants.

On May 29, Idaho-born director Richard W. Bean gets a turn with Tattoo, A Love Story, an offbeat romantic comedy about a conservative schoolteacher who loses her bearings when she falls for a heavily tattooed biker -- a brave soul who shows up in her classroom for show-and-tell. Also showing that night: Sergio Castilla's Te Amo (Made in Chile), a Chilean film about teenage anxiety and the traumas of growing up, set in teeming Santiago.

Madstone Theaters is located in Tamarac Square, 7777 East Hampden Avenue. For information and showtimes, call 303-752-3200.