+RAIN Film Festival is Europe’s first international film festival focused on artificial intelligence. Born at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and driven by the Departments of Communication and the School of Engineering, the festival has grown over its editions into a cross-disciplinary university initiative that incorporates studies in Advertising and Public Relations, Journalism, Humanities, and Translation and Language Sciences. This growth also reflects an expanded perspective: from audiovisual practices to the broader transformations that generative AI is bringing to communication, the social sciences, and culture as a whole.

+RAIN defines itself as a transdisciplinary meeting space that connects research, creation, and critical debate, bringing together researchers, creators, industry professionals, and citizens around the challenges posed by generative AI in contemporary creative, social, and cultural processes.

Its positioning has evolved from an initial curiosity about the expressive and narrative potential of AI to a much more engaged perspective on new forms of power, inequalities in access to technological resources, and the impact on cultural forms of creation. +RAIN explores the aesthetic, ethical, political, social, and environmental implications of a technology with disruptive potential that we are only just beginning to experience.

As a university festival, +RAIN has an explicit commitment to knowledge transfer, actively involving PhD candidates and emerging researchers in curation and organization, and generating a multimodal documentary legacy—reports, infographics, and audiovisual capsules—that extends beyond the event and feeds future research lines. The festival is also built on a strong commitment to accessibility and diversity of perspectives, ensuring that its program reaches everyone in Catalan. +RAIN thus helps consolidate Barcelona and Catalonia as a leading European hub at the intersection of AI and audiovisual creation.

+RAIN is supported by the Government of Catalonia, the Barcelona City Council, the Social Council of Pompeu Fabra University, CCCB and 3Cat, and in collaboration with the Chair of Communication Futures, the Catalan Audiovisual Cluster, the Official College of Marketing and Advertising of Catalonia, the Filmoteca de Catalunya, the Goethe-Institut, GROC of the University of Girona, HacTe, RedACTS, PHONOS and Panòptic.