Ranked alongside the Alcatraz prison-break for its daring and ingenuity, Escape from Pretoria tells the true, edge-of-your-seat account of how three freedom fighters cracked ten steel doors and escaped a maximum-security prison armed only with wooden keys.

Cape Town, 1975: Tim Jenkin and Stephen Lee are two white, average, twenty-somethings enjoying the privileges of a racially segregated South Africa. But, they have a secret; they work covert missions as operatives for the outlawed African National Congress - driven by their passion for truth and justice, and commitment to radical action in the fight for equality. Some whites leave the country in protest; they’ve stayed to fight.

Tracked down by the State Secret Police (along with their black girlfriends – interracial relationships illegal in apartheid South Africa) they are branded grade-A terrorists in a time when the ANC, seeking freedom and equal rights for all creeds and colours, was banned under the country’s oppressive and fascist Nationalist Party. Given lengthy prison sentences, they are incarcerated in 1978 in the ‘white man’s Robben Island’, Pretoria Central Prison, where the two men meet long serving inmate,Denis Goldberg, Nelson Mandela co- conspirator, and Rivonia Trial co-defendant. Unlike Goldberg, who is determined to be true to the cause, standing in solidarity with black comrades on Robben Island by serving out his 3 life sentences, Jenkin and Lee, joined by fiery fellow inmate and French-Australian national Leonard Fontaine, decide to send the regime a clear message - and escape!

With breath-taking ingenuity, meticulous surveillance, audacious dry runs, and wooden keys crafted by Jenkin for each of the 10 steel doors leading to the main door, they make a bid for freedom…As well as a thrilling will-they-won’t-they escape, it’s a story of our time, of an oppressed majority’s struggle; of believing anything is possible; of breaking ranks with the ruling minority to bring about change; of rogue states and terrorists, and doing the right thing against all the odds; a South African story then, a universal story today.

Note: This film is only available for screening virtually in Canada (and not the USA).