Song of China

United Photoplay Service was founded by Chinese cinema pioneer Luo Mingyou, merging several Shanghai film companies and pooling resources with investors from Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong in 1930 in an effort to foster better filmmaking. Moving operation from Hong Kong to Shanghai the next year, Luo began actively recruiting filmmakers, one of them the respected director Fei Mu. As a response to the government's New Life Movement campaign, Luo and Fei codirected Song of China (the latter is listed as Assistant Director in the credits) as a tribute to Confucian tenets. Avoiding the usual intense histrionics of family dramas, the film instead tells its story with quiet poetics, capturing events and emotions with subtle animations of mise-en-scene. Song of China is also the first Chinese film to feature a full score of Chinese music.