Moose Dreams

"She's sad," says Kirk.

"But what's going on with her?"

"She's seeking solace by going to the museum, by looking at art."

"But why is she sad in the first place?"

Kirk is quiet for a moment. A devilish grin spreads across his face. "She's sad because she hasn't seen a moose yet."

While Kirk wants to win this competition, he knows that film-judging is more art than science. A rock-solid film won't guarantee victory. Three of his previous four 48 Hour films have won an award -- but never the top prize. The closest he's come was in 2004 with "Deeper Than Under," a film noir about a washed-up gumshoe who seduces young women through hypnosis. The picture teemed with slick black-and-white images and kitschy lines: "I was on a big slide," says the gumshoe, "like a drunk donkey on ice skates."

Kirk thought he'd made a winner, but "Deeper Than Under" finished second. "There's no worse place to come in than second place," he says. "That's like, almost, almost, almost."

Later the film was accepted into the L.A. Short Film Festival, traditionally a staging point for short works with Oscar ambitions. Kirk and Brad Mendelsohn flew to L.A. for the screening, but when they arrived at the theater, they were greeted with blank stares: Deeper than what? Organizers told the pair of Washingtonians that their tape had never been received. Perplexed, Kirk says that he pointed to the listing of "Deeper Than Under" in the festival's official program. It was no use. Kirk numbly watched the other films; his own was never screened.

Last year his 48 Hour film "Chasing Greed" was less successful, although it won an award for best graphics. Kirk knows that even if he wins this year, the prize wouldn't automatically catapult him to the status of a professional director. Still, these annual events have shaped his hopes for the future. "I have noticed that for the past four years, the times I have felt the most alive were during the making of these projects," he writes in an e-mail. "That makes me look at the other 363 days of the year and say, 'I want my life to be more like those two days.' "

It's 9:30 on Saturday morning, and 34 hours are left on the clock. The cast and crew are sipping coffee on the back porch of a big, two-story house in the Palisades section of Northwest Washington. It belongs to friends of Kirk, who are letting him film here. Kirk and Eric worked on the script until 3 a.m., and Kirk managed to sleep for a couple of hours. He is ruddy and alert as he explains his "enigmatic" story to the team.

This is a movie about an artistic photographer, Bruno, who has found a fantastic new technique, Kirk says. Bruno deliberately "loses" his camera. Strangers find it and take pictures. Bruno then somehow recovers the camera and develops the film, which is supposed to reveal a mysterious inner truth about those who've been photo-graphed. One place where Bruno will set down his camera is outside the Hirshhorn Museum. The other is a party honoring Tim Tate, a sculptor of gay glass.

"And, strangely enough, there's a moose at the party," Kirk says. And the moose snags Bruno's camera to take pictures of his own lustful romp with another partygoer. ("Okay, but this is absolutely the last time," the woman will say to the moose, knocking out the required line of dialogue.)