+RAIN Film Festival 2026

Description

+RAIN Showcases the Many Facets of Artificial Intelligence in Barcelona

The International Film and Artificial Intelligence Festival takes place from June 14 to 17 at the UPF Poblenou Campus in Barcelona, ​​the CCCB, and the Filmoteca de Catalunya.

This edition focuses on themes such as technological sovereignty, the materiality of AI, and the sustainability and ethics of generative models, among others.
+RAIN will feature prominent experts such as Thomas Poell, Christian Katzenbach, Anna Jankowska, Oriol Nieto (Adobe), Rob Lang (Reuters), and Veronika Solopova, among others.

Eight films will compete in the FEST section for the Best International Film award and the Talent Award for the best film produced in Catalonia.
This year, the Filmoteca de Catalunya joins the festival to present Dracula (2025) by Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude.

Barcelona, ​​May 14, 2026 – Today, the fourth edition of +RAIN International Film and Artificial Intelligence Festival was officially launched. Organized by Pompeu Fabra University and the UPF Foundation, the festival will take place from June 14 to 17 at the UPF Poblenou Campus, the Teatre del Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, ​​and the Filmoteca de Catalunya. Frederic Guerrero, the festival director, and Alan Salvadó, head of the FEST section along with Margot Mecca, presented all the details and new features of this year's edition.

The fourth edition of +RAIN confirms its position as a leading global forum for the debate on the impact of AI integration in film, audiovisual media, and digital culture. In a context of change and consolidation of the main models of language, image, video, and sound, which are converging toward stereotypical forms in the field of digital and audiovisual culture, +RAIN continues its spirit of exploration and support for narrative and aesthetic experimentation, as well as for pushing new boundaries of representation. This year, the festival will also discuss technological sovereignty; the materiality of AI; sustainability and its effects on the environment; the use of AI in accessing digital culture; the ethics and security of the models, as well as their uses as tools for disinformation and historical reconstruction; the social implications of integrating AI into audiovisual media; the emergence of a new subjectivity and the transformation of authorship and creativity; and work processes and friction as a key concept in AI-assisted creation, among other aspects.

The graphic image of this edition is articulated from the figure of Donna Haraway's cyborg, understood as a hybrid creature that inhabits the intersection between the human and the artificial. The image, created by illustrator Guillem Bosch, departs from classic AI visual codes to address its complexity: a proposal that not only explores the technology's creative potential but also focuses on its invisible infrastructure, environmental impacts, and political implications. Through a human-like and dense line, the poster champions design as a critical tool for bringing to light the constant tensions and negotiations that define our relationship with artificial intelligence.

RESEARCH
In the research section of the +RAIN Film Festival, several international experts will lead an international research session dedicated to the future of artificial intelligence in digital content creation and its impact on the audiovisual sector.

On the morning of June 15, the Auditorium at the Poblenou Campus will host high-level presentations by Ramón López de Mántaras, emeritus researcher at the IIIA-CSIC, who will offer a historical overview of the development of artificial intelligence, emphasizing the most controversial aspects of the current use of generative AI; Thomas Poell, from the University of Amsterdam, will present "Global Perspectives on AI and the Screen Industries," a talk that moves beyond ethnocentric views from the Global North and explores how the language of AI affects working methods in communities of female creators in Nigeria and Brazil, among others. Christian Katzenbach, professor at the University of Bremen and researcher at HIIG, will offer a broad perspective on the social implications of generative AI. Also participating will be Oriol Nieto, Senior Research Engineer at Adobe Research, who will provide an industry perspective, exploring Adobe's developments in sound and music. Veronika Solopova, a researcher at DFKI and TU Berlin, will present "The Evolution of Propaganda from Film to AI," a lecture invited by the Goethe-Institut, on deepfakes and the use of AI in propaganda documentaries, titled "The Evolution of Propaganda from Film to AI." and Anna Jankowska, professor and researcher at the University of Antwerp and Jagiellonian University, who will contribute her experience in the field of translation, with an approach to new forms of accessibility to audiovisual media.

FEST
The FEST section, directed by Margot Mecca and Alan Salvadó, will move the festival's activities to the CCCB Theatre, where the films in competition in the Official Selection will be screened, followed by a discussion with the filmmakers. The works selected for this edition are Room 174 by Maria Bernardi, Ping Pong by Tianji Yu, 09/05/1982 by Jorge Caballero and Camilo Restrepo, The Valley Where LOAB Lives by Georg Tiller, Love Your Nails by Narges Kalhor, Last May in Theaters by Arief Budiman, Archiva Qu(ia)r by Diego Marchante, and L'uomo più bello del mondo by Paolo Baiguera. Thematically, +RAIN 2026 becomes a mirror of contemporary social concerns, where generative AI is used as a mechanism to recover collective memory and illuminate dark points in history. Thus, the festival stands out for the political nature of many of its offerings and a desire to subvert traditional genres and visual textures in order to question the limits of real-world perception.

This year, there are two awards: the Best International Film Award, worth €1,500, and the Talent Award for the best film produced in Catalonia, a new addition to this edition, also worth €1,500. The jury responsible for awarding the prizes will be announced very soon.

RADU JUDE AT THE FILMOTECA DE CATALUNYA
One of the major new features of this edition is the collaboration with the Filmoteca de Catalunya to focus on the work of Radu Jude. The Romanian filmmaker, to whom the Filmoteca is dedicating a retrospective, is one of the most important names in contemporary auteur cinema for his critical analysis of the digital image, incorporating generative AI in his reinterpretation of the Dracula myth (2025). The festival program will include two screenings of the film (on June 5 and 14), with the director in attendance at the first screening. This collaboration reaffirms +RAIN's commitment to connecting cutting-edge technology with film history and rigorous cinematic thought.

WORKFLOWS
The second day of the festival at the Auditori on the Poblenou Campus will focus on the WORKFLOWS section, a space for presentations and roundtables to analyze the transformation of creative processes through AI. The morning program will be closely linked to research, beginning with the presentation "Generative AI and Value in the Creative Industries" by Claudio Celis (University of Amsterdam), followed by presentations from Víctor Jiménez (Bitlab Cooperativa Cultural), director and visual artist Chino Moya, filmmaker Oriol Rigata, and activist and educator Diego Marchante.

In the afternoon, the WORKFLOWS FEST session will connect directly with the film component of the festival, including presentations by international filmmakers and featured projects such as Mutations My Word, by Carme Puche and Sergio Álvarez-Napagao, winner of the Barcelona Crea +RAIN 2025 Grant awarded by ICUB. The session will conclude with the presentation of the short film Membrana by Jorge Carrión (director of the Master's Program in Creative Writing at UPF-Barcelona School of Management), an adaptation of his novel of the same name, directed by Anna Giralt and produced by Jorge Caballero. The session will culminate with the awards ceremony for the Official Section, bringing the competitive portion of the festival to a close.

LIVE
Tuesday's program concludes with the LIVE section, a performative event featuring live musical and audiovisual works in the Aranyó Room on the Poblenou Campus.

Under the theme "Another Intelligence," this year's LIVE section proposes a shift from viewing AI as simply optimized calculation to practices that explore embodied, situated, and collective intelligences. The program emphasizes tactical and critical approaches through three key proposals: the trio External Operator (Ilia Viazov, Paulina Andrzejak, and Diego Alejandro Morales Castillo) will present a performance of sonic codependency that posits intelligence as a distributed and relational process between post-instrumentalists and machines; artist and researcher Farzaneh Nouri will explore speculative machine learning and the analysis of non-representational data to rethink human-machine improvisation outside of conventional methods; Finally, njk (Nueen and Jason Kolàr) will present Algorithmic Accompaniment, a sound intervention that uses degraded materials and dystopian jingles to critically reflect on alienation, the erosion of personal autonomy, and the affective effects of dominant digital infrastructures. With this series of performances, the festival seeks to reclaim technology to test its limits and highlight everything that emerges from the interaction between bodies and environments.

SIDE EVENTS
Furthermore, +RAIN expands with SIDE EVENTS, thematic activities held in collaboration with different departments at UPF that address artificial intelligence from various disciplines.

The ethical dimension is covered in HUM+RAIN (Department of Humanities), with a screening and discussion session on digital subjectivity featuring Christian Katzenbach, Fernando Zaparaín, Roc Albalat, Julia Lull, Nausikaä El-Mecki, and Tomas Macsotay.

The linguistic field is analyzed in TRANSLATE+RAIN (Department of Translation and Language Sciences), where researcher Marta Brescia will present her research on audiovisual translation, followed by a round table discussion with Anna Jankowska, Damián Santilli, Rosario de Zayas, and Rafa López, moderated by Paula Igareda.

For its part, AD+RAIN (Communications Department) will discuss the transformation of advertising with presentations by creative director Isabelita Virtual, film director Chino Moya, and designer Àlex Casabó (ÀNIMA Design), concluding with a panel discussion featuring Carlos Ortet (Zoopa), David Pueyo, and Jofre Banquells (Ogilvy).

Finally, MEDIA+RAIN, led by Roger Cassany of the Communications Department, will explore journalism with researcher Veronika Solopova (DFKI / TU Berlin), AI editor Rob Lang (Reuters), CTO Xavi Vinaixa (Sorensen AI), and David Quiñonero, Director of Digital and AI at Diari ARA.

SINAPSI AND THE 4TH OPEN FORUM ON ARTS, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
The festival will close its program on June 17 with SINAPSI, a closed-door, deliberative, and pluralistic laboratory where creators, researchers, ethics and AI experts, legal professionals, and cultural industry professionals will exchange perspectives to co-create conceptual frameworks and relevant questions.

The day will conclude with the 4th Open Forum on Arts, Science & Technology, an event organized by HacTe and promoted by redACTS. This forum is conceived as a transdisciplinary space for sharing current artistic and scientific research questions, aiming to connect knowledge communities and foster hybridization between them.

+RAIN is organized by Pompeu Fabra University and the UPF Foundation. It is supported by the Government of Catalonia, the Barcelona City Council, the UPF Social Council, the Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, ​​and 3Cat. Promoted by the Department of Communication and the School of Engineering of the UPF. With the participation of the Department of Humanities and the Department of Translation and Language Sciences. And with the collaboration of the Càtedra Futurs de la Comunicació, Clúster Audiovisual de Catalunya, Filmoteca de Catalunya, Goethe Institut, GROC - Grup de Recerca en Orígens del Cinema de la Universitat de Girona, HacTe, Phonos i Panòptic.

The fourth edition of +RAIN will be held from June 14 to 17, 2026 at the Pompeu Fabra University (Poblenou Campus), the CCCB and the Filmoteca de Catalunya.