At AMS Pictures, we not only make pictures that move you, we like to watch them, too!  We’ve asked one of our staffers to choose a favorite classic or recently released film they recommend.

Associate Producer, Monika Watkins, recommends Eyes on the Prize, a film created and executive produced by Henry Hampton.

The documentary I'm picking is one that has had a profound effect on me. The first time I saw this rich testament of American life, I knew I wanted to make documentaries. Eyes on the Prize tells the individual stories of many who lived during one of the most revolutionary periods in our country's history.

The late Henry Hampton, creator and executive producer of this series, masterfully assembled archival footage, songs of the movement and personal accounts to tell this significant story of our nations journey to equality. The real struggles of ordinary citizens comes to life and reveal the landscape of our country forty plus years ago. At this present moment in our country where an African American man and a woman are competing for the highest office in the nation the fruit of the seeds sown during the Civil Rights Movement are coming to harvest. I think this film is a wonderful reminder of how far we've come and what it took to get here.

The series begins by showing the state of the country in the South. The year is 1954. Within the first five minutes we are shown people who lived through the Civil Rights Movement: black, white, young, old, policemen, civilians, politicians, journalists, those for and those against. Transported through the personal accounts of the men and women featured in this documentary we are given a front seat on the freedom ride that lasted through the sixties.

Some of the stories are familiar to us now, having been covered in the media, but Hampton delves deeper into these emotional experiences. We see the events that preclude the Montgomery Bus Boycott and learn that Rosa Parks wasn't the first woman to refuse to give up her seat. Personal stories from the wives of civil rights leaders including Coretta Scott King and Myrlie Evers gives us a glimpse of the private lives these revolutionaries led. By the end of this six part series one is left with a true sense of the climate of the nation during this struggle for civil rights.

These images inspired me as a little girl. There were situations presented in Eyes on the Prize that I had not heard about in school and couldn't find in any detail in my history books. This is the beauty and power of documentary films. Through this medium one has the opportunity to hear stories of people you've never met from different times and places but whose experiences can inform and change your life.

Documentary filmmakers are fighting to keep works like this readily available to the public at reasonable prices. Licensing restrictions often times prevent filmmakers from utilizing copyrighted works like music, photography and archival footage. While fair use has been a tremendous help in this regard, allowing documentary filmmakers to use copyrighted works within their films without paying extremely high costs for it, Eyes on the Prize has been in the midst of a battle to renew the rights to its footage. The best option to view this national treasure would be to take a trip to your local public library. It's worth it.

"I hope it [Eyes on the Prize] helps prepare a certain kind of citizen to take advantage of some of the hard earned gains so that now we can move this country to a true democracy in the 21st century." -Henry Hampton