The +RAIN Film Festival was born at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra with a central question: how is artificial intelligence transforming the way we create, explain, and understand the world? Four years after its inception, the festival has become one of Europe's leading events at the intersection of AI, culture, and audiovisual communication, and this year’s program will bring together more than 120 participants from the academic, creative, and professional sectors.

The program opens on June 14 at the Filmoteca de Catalunya with the screening of Dracula, by Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude, a reinterpretation of the classic myth that incorporates generative AI and reflects on the digital image. The following day, June 15, the festival kicks off in the morning at the UPF Poblenou Campus with RESEARCH, an international research session featuring top-level speakers. In the afternoon, the festival moves to the CCCB Theatre for FEST, the competitive section, with screenings of eight short films selected from over 200 submissions. On June 16, the section WORKFLOWS will bring together international artists and experts to analyze how AI transforms creative processes and redefines the role of the author. In the afternoon, Sala Aranyó hosts LIVE, a performative musical and audiovisual event. The festival closes on June 17 with SINAPSIS, a closed-door deliberative laboratory to co-create conceptual frameworks and generate relevant questions about the future of AI and culture.

The MTG collaborates in the organization of the section LIVE, co-directed by MTG members Frederic Font and Sonia Espí, and curated by Blazej Kotowski, and the section RESEARCH, co-directed by Frederic Font.

RESEARCH:

International research workshop about the future of AI in digital content creation and its impact on the audiovisual sector. +RAIN faces the new challenges that AI poses, which include technological sovereignty, the materialization of AI and sustainability, the dilemmas in the construction of reality, the new frameworks of creation and the work processes that arise from them, the revolution in accessibility, and ethics in the use of models. Program includes:

• La ficció de la creativitat artificial by Ramon López de Mántaras, emeritus researcher at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC) in CSIC
• Global Perspectives on AI and the Screen Industries by Thomas Poell, professor of data, culture and media at the University of Amsterdam and director of the masters program in Media Studies.
• Bringing Generative AI into Being: Controversies, Corporate Power and Creative Work by Christian Katzenbach, professor of communication and media studies at the University of Bremen (ZeMKI) and associate researcher at the HIIG
• Disseny Sonor amb IA Centrat en la Creativitat Humana by Oriol Nieto, Senior Research Engineer at Adobe Research
• The Evolution of Propaganda from Film to AI by Veronika Solopova, AI researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in TU Berlin
• The New Accessible Cinema by Anna Jankowska, professor and researcher in translation at the University of Antwerp and the Jagiellonian University (UNESCO chair in translation)

LIVE:

Under the idea of Another Intelligence, this year the section proposes shifting the vision of AI as mere optimized calculation toward practices that explore embodied, situated, and collective intelligences. The program emphasizes tactical and critical approaches through three key proposals:

• External Operator (Ilia Viazov, Paulina Andrzejak, and Diego Alejandro Morales Castillo), presenting a performance of sonic codependency that frames intelligence as a distributed and relational process between post-instrumentalists and machines.
• Farzaneh Nouri: The artist and researcher will explore speculative machine learning and non-representational data analysis to rethink human-machine improvisation outside of conventional methods.
• njk (Nueen and Jason Kolàr), presenting Algorithmic Accompaniment, a sonic intervention that uses degraded materials and dystopian jingles to critically reflect on alienation, the erosion of autonomy, and the affective effects of dominant digital infrastructures.

Free entry until full capacity is reached

+RAIN information and registration:

The complete program and registration form are available on the festival website: www.upf.edu/web/rainfilmfest