Mandela, of course, is in a different prison miles away, because black and white prisoners are held separately. That’s enough to get the two incarcerated by a legal system designed to protect apartheid, and when they arrive at Pretoria, they’re surrounded by other political prisoners, including Denis Goldberg (Ian Hart), who was arrested alongside Nelson Mandela. The movie opens with a tense sequence featuring Jenkin and Lee on a crowded street planting what look like bombs, but turn out to be something closer to jack-in-the-boxes –designed to disperse leaflets with a literal bang, sending them flying all over the street (but not harming anyone). Based on the memoir by South African anti-apartheid activist Tim Jenkin, Escape tells the story of how Jenkin (played by Daniel Radcliffe) and two fellow prisoners broke out of Pretoria Central in 1979, a little over a year after Jenkin and his African National Congress associate Stephen Lee (Daniel Webber) were handed long prison sentences (twelve and eight years, respectively) for distributing leaflets in support of banned organizations. The inmates who break out of Pretoria Central Prison are imprisoned for their political activities, but the context is mostly irrelevant to Francis Annan’s Escape From Pretoria, which is far more interested in generating suspense and painstakingly chronicling procedural details than in delivering a social message.
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