Upper School Teacher Travels to Sundance of Mexico

“I was quiet for a long time,” Mr. Katz. said. “I told Josh, ‘You’re going to have to tell me how to feel right now because I don’t have the emotional register capable of processing this at this moment.’”

Mr. Katz, who says he has been obsessed with movies since he was a kid, wrote his first screenplay at age 11. “A small one,” he said.

To date, he has written four or five feature-length screenplays. His latest work, Murphy’s Act, falls into the thriller genre. Mr. Katz and Mr. Thorud began working on it together about 18 months ago. They started writing on weekends at each other’s homes and then, when Mr. Thorud moved to Iowa for a new job, via Skype.

“We’d talk about ideas and then each of us would go and write,” Mr. Katz said. “And then we’d come back and compare what we did. It was really a lot of fun.”

In the last month or so, the gravity of his accomplishment is sinking in. Mr. Katz received a note from the festival’s operations director congratulating him for his work, and this year, the Oaxaca FilmFest is partnering with the Sundance Film Festival.

“In terms of the independent film world, that’s the mecca,” Mr. Katz said. “To hear that, I’m waiting for a state when this all makes sense to me.”

He heads to Mexico from Oct. 8-15, where he will find out how Murphy’s Act fares.

“If there is something that’s really unique about our script, I think it’s that it starts out as one thing and veers into something else,” Mr. Katz said. “I find that really exciting when it’s done well. That’s the goal.”

Here are Mr. Katz’s Top 5 favorite films — today. “There are many, many more,” he said. “This list could change tomorrow! Maybe it should. How do I leave out Dog Day Afternoon or Seven Samurai or The Royal Tenenbaums or Brief Encounter or Hard to Be a God and look at myself in the mirror?”