[dropcap]A[/dropcap]s well as a rich literary history and region-based qualification for Amazon Prime overnight shipping, an annual high-profile film festival is certainly on the wishlist of every young urbanite in search of a city to call home. Now in its thirteenth year, the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival (JDIFF) launched today its exciting and diverse programme of contemporary world cinema, inviting audiences to its 130-strong sundry of films from nearly forty countries (you’ll never visit), that will screen in venues across the city over eleven days (to neglect your dissertation). More than just a string of screenings, this year’s expanded JDIFF also includes various educational workshops, informative Q&As with filmmakers, opportune industry events to schmooze and sell your life rights, always-worthwhile short film selections, and, importantly, the Festival’s Picture House outreach project extending out to hospitals and care homes. Kenneth Branagh and Julie Andrews are this year’s respective recipients of the festival’s Volta award (named for Ireland’s first dedicated cinema, established in 1909 by James Joyce — which is now a Penneys), the former bringing his charming Cinderella adaptation to the Savoy after its Berlinale berth, and the latter closing the festival at Bord Gáis Energy Theatre with the 50th Anniversary celebration of The Sound of Music (1965). This year’s selection of restorations include, to name just a few, Jean Renoir’s Partie de Campagne (1936) and Richard Brook’s In Cold Blood (1967), while Stanley Kubrick’s innovative and Tipperary-shot Barry Lyndon (1975), the rare example of an adaptation of a 19th century novel done right, will celebrate its 40th anniversary with actor Ryan O’Neal and longtime Kubrick collaborator-producer Jan Harlan.

The 2015 JDIFF schedule ensures that you might never be more than a kilometre or two from an interesting or riveting film, of which, here are — as it is impossible to whittle down to just ten — eleven:

The Price of Desire – Thursday March 19, 8.15pm, Savoy 1
Mary McGuckian’s Irish-Belgian The Price of Desire opens JDIFF in earnest (and in the cavernous Savoy 1), chronicling the life and career of Enniscorthy’s Eileen Gray (Orla Brady) — the scrutinised Bauhaus-era designer and architect whose relationships and rifts with Romanian architect and architecture critic Jean Badovici, and Le Corbusier, threatened erasure to her work on 1929 Modernist villa E-1027 in the south of France.

99 Homes – Friday March 20, 8.30pm, Cineworld 9
Director of the acclaimed Man Push Cart and Chop Shop, Ramin Bahrani’s timely and topical thriller 99 Homes charts the struggles of an unemployed and cornered contractor (an unmasked Andrew Garfield between blockbusters) losing his home to foreclosure, and the Faustian deal-with-the-devil he makes with the villainous, avaricious real-estate broker (Michael Shannon) who has evicted him. It’s a scenario that looks likely to resonate and a well-assembled cast (which also includes Laura Dern) that looks equally likely to impress.

While We’re Young – Saturday March 21, 8pm, Cineworld 9
While we wait impatiently for his and Greta Gerwig’s Mistress America (but for how much longer?), Noah Baumbach’s solo While We’re Young — a seemingly semi-autobiographical generational comedy in which a married pair of Roger Greenbergs (Naomi Watts and Ben Stiller) reminisce nostalgically on the glory Frances Halladays of youth — continues its run on the festival circuit ahead of its anticipated general release this April.

Listen Up Philip – Sunday March 22, 6.30pm, Cineworld 9
Promising new filmmaker Alex Ross Perry follows Jason Schwartzman’s solipsistically distracted author and creative writing professor — a nastier permutation of Bored to Death’s Jonathan Ames or Rushmore’s Max Fischer who has outgrown his once endearing false-precocity — in the novelistic and petrifying Listen Up Philip, reiterating the colours and tones of ‘70s Cassavetes and revisiting Woody Allen’s neurotic New York.

Miss Julie – Tuesday March 24, 6.15pm, Cineworld 9
Relocating Strindberg’s canonical and naturalistic, pared-back play, from Sweden to rural Co. Fermanagh, Norway’s Liv Ullmann adapts for the screen the classic character study and the warring, symbolic back-and-forth between our eponymous heroine Julie (Jessica Chastain) and her ambiguous bad-man Valet Jean/John (Colin Farrell). Having been put through hell in Ingmar Bergman’s all-too-real, turbulent Scenes from a Marriage (1973) and choked-up Persona (1966), both of which had me holding my tiny face in my hands, Ullmann is the ideal interpreter of this stealthily devastating and complex human drama.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night – Wednesday March 25, 8.45pm, Cineworld 8
Irish audiences have to wait no longer to discover why exactly Ana Lily Amirpour’s film debut (self-described as an “Iranian Vampire Spaghetti Western”) has been such a cultural lightning rod, having made quite the ongoing stir since premiering at last year’s Sundance and its patient, subsequent distribution from VICE’s Eddy Moretti — drawing along the way some enviable comparisons to Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino.

Bertolucci on Bertolucci – Friday March 27, 6.45pm, IMC Screen
Walter Fasano and Luca Guadagnino (“I Am Love”) compile and craft a spiffy profile of the illustrious career of maestro Bernando Bertolucci (writer-director of Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor, and model-of-cool The Dreamers) entirely from previous interviews with the Italian auteur and deep cuts from the Bertolucci archives, and both will be present after this documentary’s JDIFF screening for a Q&A.

Clouds of Sils Maria – Saturday March 28, 1pm, Cineworld 9
This insightful and nuanced drama can perhaps be considered a much-needed corrective counterpart, or antidote, for those unconvinced or even torn up by the enormous success of the contrarian and confused, surface-obsessed and hateful Birdman. The Cesar-nominated Clouds of Sils Maria similarly has its filmmaking fold in on itself, Juliette Binoche starring this subtle and self-reflexive film from French director Olivier Assayas as a fading actress wistfully revisiting the acting role that launched her career.

The Salt of the Earth – Saturday March 28, 9pm, Cineworld 9
Though director of cult favourites and crossover art-house hits like Wings of Desire (1987) and Paris, Texas (1984), the reinvented Wim Wenders has become more notable in recent years for his remarkable foray into documentary. He returns to the form once again, after Buena Vista Social Club (1998) and his inspired 3D documentary on Cafe Muller modern dancer Pina Bausch, to depict in The Salt of the Earth, the work of socially conscious photographer and Brazilian photojournalist Sebastião Salgado.

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence – Sunday March 29, 2pm, Light House 1
The final part of his “life” trilogy, Roy Andersson’s latest bizarro surrealist esoterica was a welcome winner of the most recent Venice Film Festival’s highest-honour Golden Lion — the comedy (its lengthy title taken from a Bruegel painting, the film itself inspired by The Bicycle Thieves) promising in its sequences and series of vignettes to amount to some sort of a sublime whole and marvellous catharsis.

The New Girlfriend – Sunday March 29, 4pm, Light House 1
Ever playful and always witty prolific French filmmaker Francois Ozon (the dapper and clever Dans La Maison, and more serious Jeune et Jolie) examines in his latest release gender roles and identity binaries in transvestitism — a topic not too often represented in mainstream European cinema, save perhaps for Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways — approaching this tricky subject matter and balancing psychological drama and with some of his typical and trademark levity.

The 13th Jameson Dublin International Film Festival will take place from March 19–29. The full programme is available to view on the festival website jdiff.com. Tickets can be booked online, in person at the Festival Box Office on 13 Lower Ormond Quay, or at Ticket Offices in Cineworld and the Light House from March 14.