One of the great cinematic success stories of the past year is arriving on DVD, and it helps that it’s a local production. Up the Yangtze is Yung Chang’s epic, gorgeous documentary exploration of China’s thunderous economy and its human repercussions. Chang chooses to tell the story of the Three Gorges Dam through the lives of a few Chinese teenagers, who head off to make a few bucks working on a boat that caters to Western tourists. What follows is a poetic meditation on the lives and opportunities of these young Chinese—and also a dramatic exposé on just how rough the Chinese government can be towards its own citizens.

Chang shows us the Big Picture while never neglecting the details—a kitten that drapes itself over family members as they sleep in their dilapidated hut is captured by his cameras. Coproduced by EyeSteelFilm and the NFB, this is (yet) another reason to denounce the Harper regime’s cuts to film funding and to seriously fear their stewardship under a possible majority. Canada’s fragile film scene has finally gained some traction, and confident filmmaking ventures like this one rely to some extent on vital government subsidy.

Also out on DVD is Mister Lonely, from one of America’s strangest and most impressive auteurs, Harmony Korine. Fans know him primarily for his breakout experimental feature Gummo (1997), criticized by some as a cruel and exploitative film. In his latest, a young man (Diego Luna) struggles to make a living as a Michael Jackson impersonator while living in Paris (a performance in an old-folks home early in the story is a standout).

There, he meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator (Samantha Morton), who insists Luna would be less lonely if he joined her and her family on their island commune, populated entirely by impersonators. He goes to join Marilyn and her husband, a virtual Charlie Chaplin, and their daughter, a virtual Shirley Temple. It’s as weird as it sounds. And while it doesn’t deliver all of the take-no-prisoners weirdness of some of Korine’s earlier work, Mister Lonely will still please his diehard fans.