One of Chantal Akerman's Best Films Is in Legal Limbo The Belgian-born director's 1994 coming-of-age masterwork, about a precocious teen-ager's romantic audacity, can't be reissued because of its needle drops. Much of direction is production: the material conditions under which a movie is made plays a major role in the creative process. Movie lovers tend to think of producers as dictators of formulas, oppressors of originality, the enemies of art, but that just reflects the unfortunate history of studio filmmaking in Hollywood and elsewhere. In fact, producing a movie can be a kind of art in itself, a practical imagining of possibilities for filmmakers that they wouldn't themselves have come up with. The complete retrospective of Chantal Akerman's work that runs at from September 11th to October 16th includes a superb instance of this phenomenon--of visionary production fostering directorial artistry--in her "Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 60s in Brussels," an hour-long movie from 1994.

Now based in New York City, the biotech announced this week that it's been awarded a $1.5 million Small Business Innovation Research Phase II grant from the National Institutes of Health – the second time the NIH has backed the data-crunching startup. The new award is earmarked for the continued development of SpliceCore, Envisagenics' proprietary, cloud-based drug-discovery platform, which uses artificial-intelligence protocols to identify biomarkers and potential pharmaceutical targets. The two-year NIH grant also continues a significant hot streak for the bioinformatics-focused startup, launched in 2013 by cofounders Maria Luisa Pineda and Martin Ackerman with the help of a $100,000 seed investment by Accelerate Long Island and the Long Island Emerging Technology Fund. Envisagenics, which earned a $225,000 SBIR Phase I grant in 2015, announced earlier this month that California-based venture fund M12 (formerly Microsoft Ventures) and Washington State-based Madrona Venture Group were sinking a combined $1 million into the NYC biotech. And that chunky investment followed the November 2017 closing of a successful $2.3 million funding round, with multiple investors – including the Empire State Development Corp., New York's main economic-development driver – buying in.