Author Salman Rushdie’s recovery from the 2022 stabbing attack is being revisited in a new documentary that combines intimate footage of his treatment with the story of the threats that have followed him for decades.
The film, Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, directed by Oscar-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, draws heavily on video recordings made by Rushdie’s wife, Eliza Griffiths, during the period following the attack.
Rushdie was stabbed multiple times in August 2022 while preparing to speak at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. He suffered severe injuries, including the loss of sight in his right eye, and spent weeks recovering from the attack.
Griffiths, a poet and photographer who had married Rushdie the previous year, began documenting his recovery shortly after reaching his hospital bedside. What began as an attempt to record his progress gradually developed into an extensive visual record of the couple’s experience.
The footage captures the extent of Rushdie’s injuries and the difficult stages of his recovery, including medical treatment and his gradual return home.
Rushdie said seeing some of the footage later showed him that the damage had been considerably worse than he had initially understood. At the same time, he said the images also demonstrated how far he had recovered.
Gibney combines the personal footage with archival material covering the long history of threats against Rushdie following the publication of his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses.
In 1989, Iran’s then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s execution over the book, forcing the author into hiding for years.
The documentary examines how that history remained connected to the 2022 attack, more than three decades later.
Rushdie initially questioned whether revisiting the attack and the earlier threats was necessary, saying he did not want his life and literary career to be defined by the violence directed against him.
Gibney nevertheless saw value in bringing the two periods together, using archival footage to show the international consequences of the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses and the continuing threats faced by the author.
The documentary also explores Rushdie’s relationship with Griffiths and the role she played during his recovery. Her camera became a way of documenting an experience that neither of them initially expected to share publicly.
The film revisits the location of the 2022 attack and examines how memory can differ from what actually happened. Rushdie acknowledges that his recollection of his response during the attack was different from what the recorded footage later showed.
The documentary arrives alongside Rushdie’s own memoir, Knife, published in 2024, and Griffiths’ account of the experience, The Flower Bearers.
Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie was released in the United States on September 17 and is scheduled to open in the United Kingdom on September 30.
The film presents Rushdie’s survival not only as a story of physical recovery but also as an account of how he and his wife dealt with the aftermath of an attack that revived a decades-old threat.
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