Last Weekend of the Festival Season: NYFF Winds Down, Kelela Takes Flatbush, the Bronx Opens Its Woods
A film festival bows out, a two-night R&B residency lands on Flatbush Avenue, and the Bronx Museum starts a long conversation with its own collection.
The second Saturday of October is when the city’s cultural calendar exhales and inhales at once. The film festival that has held Lincoln Center since late September is down to its last few days, while the theaters are mid-sprint through a two-for-one fortnight that makes risk cheap. Out in Flatbush and the South Bronx, the week’s bigger stories are happening on their own schedules, a long way from the plaza. It feels like the stretch of fall when you stop reading about what’s coming and start actually going.
Theater
Off-Broadway Week runs Oct. 5–18 with two-for-one tickets across participating shows, which is the cheapest way to take a chance on something you haven’t heard of. New York Theatre Guide Last week we flagged the Bushwick Starr’s season opener, i’m not even half, which began its run Oct. 6 and continues through Oct. 24 at 419 Eldert Street. Layla Khoshnoudi created and performs it: a woman glued to her phone, watching an uprising in Iran, gets hit by a car crossing a Brooklyn street. The Bushwick Starr, TheaterMania I couldn’t find a published review yet, so consider this a recommendation on premise and pedigree, not a verdict.
On the big stages, Billy Crystal’s solo show 860, named for the address of the home his family lost in the 2025 Palisades fires, opens on Broadway Oct. 21. New York Theatre Guide
Independent Film
The 64th New York Film Festival closes Oct. 12. Alice Tully Hall is the hub, with partner screenings at BAM in Brooklyn, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, Alamo Drafthouse on Staten Island, and AMC Bay Plaza in the Bronx, so all five boroughs get a seat. Time Out New York Ava DuVernay’s 14th was set to close it with a world premiere Oct. 9. Film at Lincoln Center
Review
NYFF64 “closes Oct. 12” yet 14th is the closing-night film on Oct. 9 — the two dates conflict, and the existing unverified note does not mention the contradiction — verify the festival’s actual closing date and closing-night film before relying on either.
Unverified
The closing-night programming comes from last week’s pre-festival announcement; I could not reach the festival’s site to confirm how the final days played out.
On the Lower East Side, Metrograph hosted a two-day program of the late Austrian avant-garde artist Valie Export, Tap, Touch, Burn, Oct. 3–4, presented with ACFNY and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. Export’s 16mm shorts from 1966 to 1986 are the sort of thing you almost never get to see on a screen. ACFNY
Review
“the late… Valie Export” — asserts a living-person’s death with no supporting source in the cited ACFNY link; if wrong this is a serious error — verify or cut “late”.
Music
Kelela plays two nights at the Brooklyn Paramount, Oct. 9 and 10, on her new avatar live tour, at 385 Flatbush Avenue Extension. Eventworld Listings disagree on start times (7 or 8 p.m.), so check the venue before you go.
Unverified
Dates are confirmed across several ticketing listings, but start times and prices conflict between resellers; no venue page was reachable.
Smaller rooms keep pace: Aluna at House of Yes in Bushwick on Saturday, Oct. 10, and Revocation with Defeated Sanity at Music Hall of Williamsburg on Oct. 9, a reminder that the same weekend can hold a dance-floor night and a death-metal one within a few subway stops. Songkick
Visual Arts & Other
The Bronx is the story here. The Bronx Museum of the Arts opened Saya Woolfalk’s The Woods Woman Method on Oct. 9, the first chapter of a multi-year project in which the artist applies her speculative, hybrid-world Woods Woman lens to the museum’s permanent collection, with workshops alongside the Education Department. It will inform a commission for the renovated main lobby. The Bronx Museum Art Rabbit lists the run through March 31, 2027, with free admission. Art Rabbit A companion show, Beyond the Margins, has Bronx Museum teens activating the collection and opened the same evening. Art Rabbit
Back in Brooklyn, Petra Bibeau’s Bondsinheritancemotionthings is up through Nov. 1, and the Williamsburg Biannual runs to Jan. 30, 2027. Art Rabbit
Coming Up
- Off-Broadway Week — two-for-one tickets through Oct. 18. New York Theatre Guide
- NYFF64 final day — the festival closes Oct. 12. Film at Lincoln Center
- i’m not even half — Bushwick Starr, through Oct. 24. The Bushwick Starr
- 860 — Billy Crystal’s Broadway solo show opens Oct. 21. New York Theatre Guide
- The Damned — Brooklyn Steel, Oct. 22. Concertful
Takeaway
Takeaway
This week the center of gravity drifted outward: a festival with screens in the Bronx and Staten Island, a Flatbush residency, a museum in the South Bronx handing its own collection to an artist and a roomful of teenagers. The prestige plaza still gets the headlines, but the city’s cultural energy is increasingly being made at the edges, by the people who live there.