Before he wrote Ten Days that Shook the World, radical journalist John Reed covered the Mexican Revolution. He spent months with Pancho Villa's Northern Division, sharing in their peril and their meager existence. In 1914, his reportage was collected in book form as Insurgent Mexico. This fictionalized account of Reed's political conversion during the Revolution explores the tenuous line between the detached observer and the committed activist. Amos Vogel, in the Village Voice, noted: “Reed is a work of great subtlety. We enter, stage by stage, into the true realities of the Mexican revolution: its lulls and confusions, fallible leaders, unexpected death, sudden friendships, meandering half-action. . . . The sentiment is anti-convention, anti-folklore, anti-heroism; therefore, closer to revolutionary reality.” Paul Leduc, a film critic turned director, shows great restraint in charting Reed's realization that there are times when the report of the pen is overcome by the report of the rifle. Reed won the Georges Sadoul prize for best film by a new director.