During its 45-year existence, the New York Film Festival has both championed emerging filmmakers at the dawn of their careers and offered ongoing support by showcasing new work by festival alums as they have evolved and matured. Included among this year’s dozen festival veterans are the director Sidney Lumet, who is returning to Lincoln Center’s autumn classic for the first time since 1964, and France’s Eric Rohmer, who’s making his 13th festival appearance.

But this year, the festival features one artist who is both debuting and repeating. As the co-scripter of Ira Sachs’s brilliantly acute and engagingly mannered “Married Life” and Todd Haynes’s mind-boggling, seven-headed Bob Dylan biopic “I’m Not There,” the screenwriter Oren Moverman is the unacknowledged belle of Manhattan’s grand movie ball.

So how does one guy wind up with two credits on two of the most talked about films on the festival’s 28-feature roster?

“I have no background,” Mr. Moverman said on the phone from his Manhattan apartment, adding, “you’re going to make it up as you write anyway,” by way of journalistic encouragement. But fabricating a filmmaking biography as atypical as Mr. Moverman’s would be a tall order.

A native of Israel, Mr. Moverman grew up in Givatayim, outside of Tel Aviv. “I thought about film and always dreamed about film from childhood,” he said. “But I had no plan.” His country however, did have plans for him. During four years of military service as a paratrooper in the Israel Defense Forces, Mr. Moverman cultivated the habit of writing not to fulfill literary or cinematic aspirations, but out of personal necessity. “I went through a lot of Lebanon and the First Intifada,” he said of his combat experience in the 1980s. “I kept journals and wrote just to stay sane because I was in a lot of un-sane situations.”

Two months after leaving the IDF in 1988, Mr. Moverman arrived in New York with an uncertain future and no particular means of employment. “I did a lot of odd jobs when I came to the states,” he said, including a stint in airport security. At the same time he started to write in earnest, “but it was mostly in Hebrew. I sort of inserted myself as a film critic into a local Hebrew newspaper.” That job that led to a chance meeting with the editor of Interview Magazine, Graham Fuller. “He gave me a shot writing some profiles in English,” Mr. Moverman said, “and I started doing what they called the serious interviews, interviewing Ang Lee and Spike Lee and people who made serious movies where I would bring my serious face in and ask serious questions.”

Between covering the art film beat and indie beat for Interview and working as an editor at large for Faber & Faber’s film publication division, Mr. Moverman’s reputation and his Rolodex grew. “That’s how I met a few people within the film world,” he said. He also began to have serious filmmaking ambitions of his own and in 2000, “I found myself with a script that I wrote and was lucky enough to get financed and that I was going to direct.” With just two days to go before the cameras rolled, the film’s French financiers pulled out. “The French company spent all this money on preproduction but then they just stopped,” Mr. Moverman said. Instead of a feature directing credit, “I was left with a writing sample.”

His unproduced script led to produced screenplay credits for Alison MacLean’s 1999 art house Americana pastiche “Jesus’ Son,” and Bertha Bay-Sa Pan’s 2002 drama “Face.” It also yielded multiple projects that remain in various states of financial and developmental disarray, like an adaptation of William Burroughs “Queer,” for director Steve Buscemi, a drama about director Nicholas Ray’s final decade for the director Philip Kaufman, and a new take on Walter Tevis’s science-fiction novel “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” “I became a screenwriter,” Mr. Moverman said bemusedly. “It’s nice to have just one job.”

And two languages? “It keeps me on my toes,” he offered, admitting that his “uncomfortable relationship” with English sometimes “feels like this big drawback”when creating film scripts, simultaneously one of the least literary and yet most potently evocative forms of written expression. But regularly traversing the mental terrain between his native and adopted languages has turned out to be good exercise. “I don’t always know that I’m doing things correctly. But it keeps me kind of guessing and wanting to learn more and wanting to improve. I like to stay in that sort of disadvantage,” Mr. Moverman said. “It’s a strategy.”