In this short film, which is part-documentary and part-memoir, Farrah Berrou takes us to her ancestral border village of Kfarkila in southern Lebanon for the first time since October 8, 2023, the same day that Lebanon became a support-front to Gaza and Palestine in a post-October 7th world.

A few weeks into the latest escalation of Israel’s war on Lebanon, I put out a call on Instagram: organizers can screen Buffer Zone if it’s used as part of a fundraiser for one of Lebanon’s mutual aid initiatives.

I didn’t expect the response and effort that came in after that first post.

As of April 3, there had been four screening-fundraisers in different cities across the world which raised just over $10,000 total for various initiatives.

I don’t yet have the final numbers of the four that followed (two hosted on April 4 and two on April 8) but every estimate relayed to me at the end of an event so far has been a much-needed boost in morale. The messages from people who have attended have been an added bonus.

There are two more fundraisers tomorrow (in Barcelona and Dearborn) and many more in the pipeline. I’m doing my best to be present virtually for each one in some capacity but regardless, I’m grateful for my organizing partners from all over.

VIEW UPCOMING SCREENINGS
(the above page is being updated as details are confirmed)

⚠️ If you would like to host an in-person fundraiser for Lebanon through a screening of Buffer Zone in your city, read the bottom of this page and reach out to me via email.1

BUT WHERE DO WE DONATE?
Al Rawiya have compiled/are updating a Google doc of multiple, active initiatives and this website was built as an easy aid directory. I’m compiling/updating my own unofficial Excel sheet of funds too.

💚A note to Aanab News paid subscribers: I have donated all of the March subscription earnings (about $300, after deduction of the Substack cut and processing fees, but I donated a total of $330) on your behalf to: the production of five The Stray Compass tote bags ($30) and Alwen w Ahlem coloring books ($50). Donations were made to Maya from Nation Station ($100) and to a grassroots medical team of nurses, doctors, and pharmacists providing free medical care to displaced folks ($150).

Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which i…

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Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which i…

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Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which i…

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Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which i…

Read more

Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which i…

Read more

Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which i…

Read more

Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which i…

Read more

Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which i…

Read more

Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which i…

Read more

Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which i…

Read more

Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which i…

Read more

Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which i…

Read more

Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which i…

Read more

Welcome to the February series, 14 days of love, loss, & longing. During the two weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, paid subscribers receive an email each day. In these letters, I explore the tender emotions and musings that emerge across the first few weeks of a new year as we get showered in hearts before the heavily-commercialized love day (which is also my birthday).

This is Day 1 of the 14-day series. This one’s free for all subscribers but if you’d like to receive these daily emails, upgrade to a paid subscription now.

For those new here, I launched the LLL series last year on a whim after subscribing to ’ 24-day advent calendar which was 24 days of daily newsletters. Feeling inspired by the arrival of her letters that year, 14 days of love, loss, & longing was an experiment that came a few months later.

I don’t have to do this, why am I giving myself more work?
Well, because it’s not that serious.

And at the time, I needed some of that levity. I still do. The experiment turned out to be both difficult and rewarding.

My biggest takeaway: being imperfectly vulnerable was a muscle you had to strengthen and, within the recovery stretches, you could find meaning. Even though they were simple daily dispatches, the series resonated with readers (or at least, that’s what a few of you told me!).

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Since publishing Day 14 last year, I’ve been saving posts on Instagram, making notes in the Notes App on my phone, dumping links in the Notes app on my laptop, and sending one-liners to myself via WhatsApp. It’s been grounding to have this quiet project on the calendar. I’ve been looking forward to its return and I’m pretty sure that the building anticipation is what led to the launch of Witchy Week in October. I couldn’t wait; I missed the fun exercise of writing within a theme. The two series are mirrors of each other yet not identical. They’re two opposing forces I feel flowing within me at all times, a gravitation to sharp angles and soft curves.

By January 2026, I had over 300 posts saved in my “Love” IG folder and I began to un-save the ones that fell flat upon revisiting. I made a bulleted list of finalists. Now, I have almost four A5 pages of thought-starters. Even with all this, the writing bit hasn’t happened yet. We’ll see if those points can become more than a paragraph and if they will have the accidental, episodic quality of last year’s letters.

→ Read the whole set, I’m biased but I loved re-reading the series last week.

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Like I said in the first intro to this series, the goal is for it to be about the spectrum of love and the gray zones around and within that spectrum. Grief, friendship, land, art, growth, self, family, pets (Penny must make an appearance, obviously), romance, and enchantment.

What I can add now is, the goal is also to sit in the discomfort this daily challenge gives me and write anyway.

Each letter will end with an about last night section where I share something from the night before. Last year it was mostly about movies I watched but it could be an article or an anecdote or a question.

Like last year, let’s start with a question to sit with for the next two weeks: What does growth look like to you?

Tonight’s full moon, February’s Snow Moon (AKA the Hunger Moon), marks the time of rest and slow, unseen growth leading up to spring. That seems like a good place to start.

Today is also the 175th anniversary of the death of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

The Basics of 14 Days of LLL

From February 1st until the 14th, paid subscribers receive a daily letter from me. You, the reader, aren’t required to do anything. Even though this is a series, the emails are separate so you don’t need to read them in sequence or even right away. Partake at your own pace.

You can click through the whole series here.

Today’s letter is free for everyone. Previews/teasers of the next letters will not be sent to free subscribers. The only way to receive these daily dispatches until the 14th is to upgrade your subscription!

If there’s someone you know who would love a daily dose of love, you can also gift a subscription.

Give a gift subscription

Welcome (back) to Aanab News!

If you’re new here: For a refresher, Aanab News is an independent, reader-funded publication about Lebanon, through the lens of wine and culture. It began as a print newspaper that ran for two years and then I shifted it online.

I’ve been writing on the internet since 2012 but my entry into Lebanese wine ironically happened when I began working with my dad at our American imports emporium in Beirut.

My professional background is all over the place: I’ve got degrees in general biology and graphic design and I’ve worked in advertising, branding, retail, podcasting, and community building. In 2023, almost as a combination of all those things, I started producing short video essays that resemble a visual diary of sorts. It was never about wine alone for me and, even after getting certifications and working in wine sales, I still feel that the interest was a device to go beyond the drink itself. You can read more about that here.

Last year…

You can scroll through all posts from 2025 here.

One of my goals was to “gently prioritize my health as much as my work” and I didn’t do that. I DID push myself to learn new skills and feed my creativity with more play but that didn’t spill over into how I took care of my body. A win overall but with room for improvement. After meeting up for breakfast just before Christmas Eve, a good friend of mine - who has listened to my body image frustrations for a while - told me that I seem to be in a better place mentally, one that will be good for focusing on my physical self in 2026. I didn’t realize that change had happened until it was said out loud but the observation makes me feel accountable. My mind is in a better place but now the rest of me could use some more love and attention too.

On that note, I did this witchy winter solstice ritual and my friend gave me a tarot reading last weekend. I’m not a serious believer in what was called “new age” in the 90s but as Witchy Week showed, I like the idea of listening to rhythms in your environment and what signs the universe is leaving for you. Some of those messages might resonate with how I’m feeling and I can take what I want from them. Without divulging too much, both rituals pushed for embracing more of my ego (without fear of seeming conceited) and acknowledging that whatever is in my way is surmountable and within my control.

What I unintentionally left out of the 2025 recap is that I applied to over 20 different fellowships, artist grants, awards, and pitches. I was rejected from or ghosted by all of them. I didn’t realize the volume until I did a tally this month.

This is part of freelance work and the life of an artist. I’m at peace with the rejections but I’m pissed about the time that went into the applications and the feedback (and money, frankly) that I did NOT get from any of them. As a solo creator, my main goal behind applying to these is either collaboration or compensation.

To be fair, I’ve also done a lot of rejecting. Opportunities that have come to me that didn’t align with my path or that would be energy sucks without the proportional payoff (monetary or otherwise) were politely declined. Both sides of this freelancer-coin make me very grateful to have Aanab and you, dear gentle readers, as the sturdy skeletal system that I decoupage other media onto. Your presence reminds me that what I’m doing matters to others outside of myself and that is a potent and incredibly flattering motivator. It sounds lame but I can’t say it enough: thank you for being here!!

ON TO JANUARY 2026

I’ve been taking it slow while thinking about all of the above and what that means for this year’s editorial calendar. I needed to recover from the pace of December and I like using deep winter as a period to rest and reflect.

With that said, I kicked off 2026 by applying for a local film residency. If I get in, it will be a great interim project (while between personal ones) to learn from and with others. If I’m passed over, I’ll be okay. Other than that, I’ve got a destination wedding coming up, the Boston screening of Buffer Zone was impactful(!), and I’m scheduling another one in Beirut next month. I’m working on getting a few more cities onboard but I won’t force it. The partnerships need to feel right, not rushed. Read more here.

In the preview of ’s Macrotrend Report 2026, a part that stood out to me was under the key theme of aspirational humanity. It was the emergence of a “hierarchy of humanness” as backlash to the flood of Ai slop. If you can prove something is more human-made, it is more valuable.

The online discourse at the top of 2026 has been all about the return to analog, triggered by that same Ai backlash and the fact that we don’t own anything anymore. I also want to unplug from The Matrix but this spike is entering trend or “core” territory. As said in this note, “it’s being turned into yet another thing to perform, another identity we need to co-opt, another aesthetic to make look beautiful and another way to signal that you’re doing life correctly.”

TLDR: I love writing here regularly but 1) I am online way too much, 2) I miss making things with my hands, and 3) I need to get out of my COVID-induced comfort zone literally and figuratively.

✨Aanab News framework for 2026✨

There are some minor changes but if you’ve been here a while, you won’t be too surprised. I’m cutting the Bulletins and the annual analysis listing 5 Predictions on Lebanese Wine. Instead of those, I’ll write an essay when a current event or development calls for in-depth analysis. Anything else that’s still worth knowing will be included in the links section of the free Monthlies newsletters.

At the moment, I’m not actively plugged into the Lebanese wine scene (the genocide in Gaza and the escalation in Lebanon rewired my brain) and I don’t see a rekindling of that infatuation happening anytime soon. There are still parts of the industry that I’m curious about, that I have knowledge on, and that connect to some of my other interests (agriculture, food, ecology, anthropology, etc) so I will let my internal compass dictate how wine shows up here as a subject. My focus is expanding rather than moving away from any one thing. As the writer behind this work, these adjustments feel the most authentic to how Aanab News is evolving.

Here’s a quick version of my Lebanese wine predictions:

MORE

• Focus on eastern markets (including the Arab Gulf)

• Co-ferments (different grapes or fruits) and color play (still blanc du noirs), “100-year-old vines” (or beyond 100), “regenerative farming”

• Scientific breakthroughs and patented wine by-products (like Piùpa)

• Cheaper or premium bubbles (but not mid-range)

• Exclusive themed dinner party/supper club/chef collabs ($$$)

• Casual comfort-food and social hour hangs (like Dua Lipa’s book tastings)

• Wine shops championing local bottles over imported

• Ai use in winery social content

• Government-endorsed projects with no follow-through (but lots of press)

• Recycled stories/narratives (for example: shallow takes on women in wine, the wine & war trope, nostalgia-coded imagery, solar panels being the only climate change effort cited in a country without 24/7 power)

LESS

• New restaurant/bar openings (the bubble finally bursts)

• Focus on natural wine (tide turned globally a while ago but Lebanon’s behind)

• Screentime and virtual wine experiences

• ABV (as in single-digit alcohol by volume)

• Focus on export (more push for local marketshare)

• Perfection (human-made!)

• Participation in October’s Vinifest

• Wine only operations (diversifying via other products like olive oils, preserves, salts, cedar-scented or crafted from cedar, graphic Ts)

• Investing in billboard advertising

• SKUs (trimming the fat and focusing on a few key bottles)

SUBSCRIPTION SPECIFICS

For all subscribers:

• Monthlies (1x/month): A monthly newsletter that includes a short essay, a roundup of links, a pic of Penny, and a “last month on Aanab News” recap of newsletters published. Like last year, the first monthly will be sent out in February.

• Essays: Long-form writing on biology, food, agriculture, the environment, film, art, design, and who knows what else. In short, just like my Instagram bio says: curiosity, culture, and cats!

  

Essays will be free for all to read but everything on Aanab News is paywalled one month after being published and only paid subscribers get access to the full archive.

For paid subscribers:

• track+field (1x/month): A recap of the physical activity and findings during the previous month. This log blends the two areas (health + work) and it tracks my time in the field. Like last year, the first track+field of 2026 will be sent out in February.

• 14 Days of love, loss, & longing (a February series): A daily newsletter that runs from February 1st until the 14th where I write about the emotions and musings that emerge leading up to Valentine’s Day/my birthday. Read last year’s intro to get a better idea of what it’s about.

• Witchy Week (an October series): A daily newsletter that runs from October 24th until October 31st. Also read last year’s intro to get a better idea of what it’s about.

Goals for 2026

• Get out of my head and in my body (improve that balance)

• 1000 subscribers while maintaining my open rate (>50%)

As a free subscriber, you’ll be hearing from me once a month most of the time so if you want to get in on the extra fun, upgrade to a paid subscription and do it now because I’m offering 30% off of the annual subscription rate until January 31st!

Get 30% off forever!

While I mull over where to take this beloved newsletter, I’d like to get some input from the audience. Crowdsourcing, brainstorming, soundboarding - call it what you will - but I don’t want to think about this alone. I’ve kept it simple (3 questions, 4 for paid…

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This newsletter incorporates movement and activity (hikes, walks, etc) into my work. I’m a productive and self-disciplined person except when it comes to tasks related to taking care of myself (like exercise, diet, and rest). This log blends the two areas of my life (health + work) and it tracks my time in the field.

The 2024 paid newsletter, Grapevine, a bulleted list of offline things I was exploring, is now collapsed into this monthly dispatch.

December was like a pot of pasta on low heat. It was slow to boil and then suddenly it was nonstop. As of the 16th, the bubbling began and it was go-go-go until…actually, the pasta’s still al dente. Things have calmed, but just a bit.

I’m looking forward to the second week of Jan when I can stay in for a stretch, cozy up on the couch, and finally clean my house.

SOME FIELD NOTES…

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If you’re new here, read this and this. I’m going to keep this brief so let’s get to it.

2025 in numbers: I published 11 monthlies, 11 track+fields (monthly recaps - December’s will be out tomorrow but still!), three wine news bulletins, three essays in other magazines (The Discontent, Rolling Stone MENA, and Al-Rawiya), and two daily series (14 days of love, loss, and longing in February and Witchy Week in October). Both series were fun yet challenging to do and I’ve been planning the next editions ever since. They will be staying in 2026 for sure.

Some posts from this year

As of January 2, 2025, Aanab had 869 subs, 57 paid. As of today, Aanab is at 869 subs with 60 paid. My email open-rate is steady. People have come and others have gone which means that my newsletter hasn’t grown overall but it hasn’t shrunk either. Surprisingly, I’m okay with this. I would like to hit 1,000 subscribers eventually just because it’d be nice to break into the four digits but if it doesn’t happen, I’ll be fine. I enjoy writing regularly here, sharing it with you all, and having your support (and sometimes with your own money too!). I am happy with my corner of the internet and how it has been evolving.

Other than Aanab:

• I attended 5 workshops (character illustration, documentary filmmaking, photo preservation, acrylic painting, film programming)

• I shot 8 rolls of photos on film

• I tried risograph printing for the first time

• I started a part-time job, reporting to a mentor in art & design

• I finished my short film, Buffer Zone, and had a public screening of it

Three things I want more of in 2026: walks, books, and analog craft hours.

I went through some subscriber notes and here are a few I can share:

• “Reading you always makes my day...” - Ralph ♥️

• “Keep up the interesting and thought-provoking work, Farrah! Looking forward to seeing what you have to say in 2026!” - Lara ♥️

• “Your work is exceptional, Your knowledge is immense So proud of you, Always, Dad” - Dad ♥️

Aanab News will be back on January 20th.

For the next few weeks, I’ll be thinking about what this newsletter will be in 2026 so please share your thoughts, good or bad, in the comments below.

Leave a comment

I’ll be posting a 2026 edition of this post once I’m back. Until then, thank you for being here with me for the ride. I am forever grateful for your company.

Love & olives,
Farrah

It’s the last day of December and the last day of 2025. This dispatch is late yet still on time as long as I get it out to you all before the clock strikes midnight. I’m planning to be watching a movie with Pen by then so I’ve got to get this (and two more Aanab recap newsletters??) done AS…

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