Primary is a documentary film about the primary elections between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey in 1960. Primary is the first documentary to use light equipment in order to follow their subjects in a more intimate filmmaking style. This unconventional way of filming created a new look for documentary films where the camera’s lens was right in the middle of what ever drama was occurring. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 1998.

For the last half of the 20th century, America was consumed by two struggles: the civil rights movement and the cold war. For 30 years, Hubert Humphrey stood at the center of both. As a soldier of the New Deal and the Great Society, he amassed one of the most prolific legislative records in senate history, sponsoring hundreds of billsfrom Medicare to the Peace Corps to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.