Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie

More than 30 years after Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, a religious decree calling for the death of author Salman Rushdie over the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie traveled to Chautauqua to speak about the United States as a sanctuary for exiled writers and artists. The event marked the 20th anniversary of a writer-refuge program – a setting meant to celebrate safety and creative freedom. It was there that a young man rushed the stage, intent on killing him with a knife. Using excerpts from Rushdie’s works, including his powerful memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, Alex Gibney’s documentary is both a striking testament to freedom of expression and a defiant response to the attempt on Rushdie’s life.

The film incorporates never-before-seen footage shot by Rushdie’s wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, in the days and weeks following the attack. This material offers a graphic, unflinching, and deeply intimate account of what happened, including archival footage of Rushdie’s early career and rise to literary fame, the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses, and events leading up to the attempted murder. It also traces Rushdie’s physical and spiritual recovery, including the challenges he continues to face, from losing an eye to the reduced use of one hand.

Knife blends reportage with fictionalized dialogues to explore the mindset of the attacker, probing the “why” behind the violence. At its core, the film is a portrait of resilience – of Rushdie’s own extraordinary strength and the love that carried him through this ordeal – and a call to action against censorship and hatred. It argues that art itself can be a form of resistance.

In Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, Gibney, working with longtime collaborators Andy Grieve (editor) and Will Bates (composer), crafts a poetic dreamscape that reflects how Rushdie views his writing as his own “knife,” a tool to fight back, reclaim his story, and respond to violence with imagination and art.