+RAIN Film Fest 2025with Universitat Pompeu Fabra

The festival

+RAIN is the international festival of films made with artificial intelligence, driven by Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), and its organisers present it as the first in Europe devoted to this kind of cinema. It explores what a film created with AI can say, and how.

The third edition took place from 10 to 13 June 2025 across the UPF Poblenou campus and the CCCB, the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona. UPF co-produced it with Sónar, and the CCCB collaborated by hosting the competition section. The aim was to open up the conversation about how far this cinema can go, creatively, legally and ethically.

The call for entries accepted fiction, documentary, animation, experimental film or music videos, on one condition: AI had to play a real role in the work. Eight films made it into FEST, the official section, screened on 10 June in the CCCB’s Sala Teatre in two sessions, with free entry by advance booking. They came from Austria, Italy, China, Belgium, France, the United Kingdom and Greece; among them were The Electric Kiss by Rainer Kohlberger and Who Was Here? by Evi Stamou. The CCCB describes them as works that look at memory, individual and collective, pay close attention to the texture of the digital image and mix real and generated images. Each session closed with a Q&A with the filmmakers.

Beyond the competition, the programme brought together talks by experts such as Migle Laukyte, Antonio Somaini, Sylvia Rothe and Ágata Lapedriza on legislation, authorship and emotions in the age of AI, as well as screenings of international films and creative processes open to the public.

What we set up

At +RAIN we set up Captions on the screen in the room. The cover photo shows it: a filmmaker talks about his film on stage, and his words appear in Catalan along the bottom of the screen, below the festival artwork. So the audience could read them in the moment, without having to look at a phone.