![]() It's such an amazing, ingenious escape and the fact that it was pulled off so elegantly and beautifully - it deserves to be in the cannon of great prison escape stories. When he was approached to play Jenkin, Radcliffe says he was struck by this thought: "It's crazy that I've never heard this story before. In prison break stories you don't usually tend to have true-life characters who are virtuous and not criminals." They were also Caucasian, middle-class men in the '70s who could have had a job in a bank, for instance, but decided to do this instead. They also don't just dig a tunnel or bop a guard over the head and run - they make something to open their cell door. "This film is a prison escape movie, which is slightly different from a prison movie. He said that in searching for a story to make his major feature debut he was looking for something familiar but also unique. For Jenkin that was the sign that this time the film would get made, after all.Īnnan, a British television and theatre director, thought the book was made to be a movie. It also didn't hurt that former Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe was attached to the project. That was until in 2017, when, at his second attempt, producer Mark Blaney managed to get the project off the ground, thanks to a script by director Francis Annan. Since then, every five years Jenkin signed contracts for the option to adapt his book to screen but each time circumstances seemed to be against him. Soon after its publication, the first attempt to film it began to look successful in 1988, but in the darkest days of apartheid, Jenkin firmly believed that the film needed to be political, and the producers wanted to cut out all the politics. Jenkin says that he'd always thought his book was "good movie material" and he wasn't wrong. He escaped with fellow activists Stephen Lee and Alex Moumbaris. In 1987 Tim Jenkin published Escape from Pretoria, a memoir of his anti-apartheid activism, arrest by the security police, imprisonment and sensational escape in 1979. 2020.SPOILER ALERT! This article contains spoilers for the film Escape from Pretoria. It is, in a word, intense.Įscape from Pretoria will arrive in theaters on March 6. In it, we see Jenkin coming up with the wild idea of crafting keys out of wood that can be used to open the prison doors - all while the horrors of apartheid still reign around him. The film’s first trailer, which was recently released, looks all kinds of thrilling. Along with two imprisoned fellow freedom fighters, played by Daniel Webber and Mark Leonard Winter, Tim escaped on 11th December 1970 using hand-made wooden keys which he crafted whilst incarcerated. Here’s the film’s official synopsis:ĭaniel Radcliffe stars as Tim Jenkin – a real life ANC activist who was imprisoned in Africa’s maximum security prison Pretoria in the 1970s during the Apartheid. Jenkin was held in the notorious Pretoria prison - that is, until he and two other inmates pulled off an incredible escape. That’s a start, right? The movie is based on the true story of Tim Jenkin, a South African anti-apartheid activist who was a political prisoner of the nation’s apartheid government in the 1970s. It’s been a while since we’ve had a good prison escape movie in the vein of The Great Escape or Escape from Alcatraz, and while Radcliffe’s Escape from Pretoria probably won’t live up to the iconic reputations of those films, it at least has the word “escape” in the title. Daniel Radcliffe has come a long way since Harry Potter, and his newest role sees him trying to escape from the toughest prison this side of Azkaban.
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