Meet Our 2025 Feature Fellowship Winner

We’re thrilled to introduce our 2025 Feature Fellowship winner, Alana Saab, whose screenplay JAANEM (MY LOVE) impressed us with its emotional resonance and layered characters.

In JAANEM (MY LOVE), a woman’s world crashes down when her transgender husband dies and she must plan a traditional Islamic funeral with her religious in-laws while trying to protect her own young son from the people that abandoned his father a decade ago. As her Muslim in-laws mourn their “daughter’s” death, she must confront painful truths about the life her husband fought to build — and the family he left behind.

Alana Saab is a Portuguese-Lebanese-American author and screenwriter. Her debut novel, PLEASE STOP TRYING TO LEAVE ME, came out with Vintage Books in 2024. She has an MFA in Fiction Writing from The New School, a Master’s in Psychology from Columbia University and a BA from NYU. Saab’s work focuses on the interplay between conscious and unconscious existence while exploring themes of queerness, trauma and the transcendent. She is an adjunct professor of creative writing and lives with her wife and four cats in New York City.

Congratulations to Alana!