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PARK CITY, Utah — The Sundance Film Festival was shaken Sunday by a harrowing new documentary about the brutal 2022 attack on Salman Rushdie in Chautauqua, New York.
The film, “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” which features never-before-seen footage of the writer’s painful 40-day recovery shot by his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths, is unsparing in its detail of his gruesome injuries.
One woman bolted out of the Ray Theatre when the camera fixated on Rushdie’s damaged eye, which was red and protruding out of its socket.
Later, he describes his eyelids being sewn shut as far more painful than the malicious actions that forced the unfortunate procedure.
But, even exhausted and with extensive bodily harm, the 78-year-old author, who was in attendance at the premiere, ardently believed his traumatic ordeal must be filmed.
“We need to document this,” Rushdie recalls saying to his wife in the gripping doc, directed by Alex Gibney. “She immediately and emphatically agreed.”
In August 2022, as he was about to give a public lecture at the Chautauqua Institution, the renowned author was ambushed by 24-year-old New Jersey resident Hadi Matar, who stabbed him 15 times.
The horrific crime was a result of the fatwa, or death sentence, put on him in 1989 by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini when Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” was deemed blasphemous to Islam.
Maimed Rushdie was then airlifted to the nearest suitable hospital, in Erie, Pennsylvania, where it was soon determined he’d survive.
“You’re lucky that the man who attacked you had no idea how to kill with a knife,” a doctor told him.
The camera begins rolling on Day 6 of his extended stay.
Plainly shown are a stitched-up cut that runs down his chest and stomach, a slice on his neck that’s been stapled together, his eye that’s hurt beyond repair and countless other wounds and bruises.
“I never expected to show that much of my body,” Rushdie said onstage at Sundance after a long standing ovation. “I’m a novelist.”
During Rushdie’s recovery, this publication spoke to his locked-up assailant for a front-page story. The headline was “DEVIL.”
“[He] made the mistake of giving a jailhouse interview to the New York Post,” Rushdie happily said in the film.
Matar’s quotes, he added, revealed premeditation and intent. In May 2025, the man was convicted of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
In the hard, early days in Erie, Rushdie’s wife privately struggles with overwhelming emotions even as she stays strong for her husband.
“It feels like I’m lost,” she says in a confessional video from the PA hospital. “It feels like the only thing that’s ever existed is this room.”
But the pair has date nights where they eat Chinese food — soup for Rushdie — lit by an electric candle, and dance to Bob Dylan inasmuch as he was able to.
The novelist receives supportive calls from friends such as “Royal Tenenbaums” director Wes Anderson, who takes a long pause after Rushdie says, “I think I’ve lost my right eye. That’s not coming back.”
Yet, throughout this difficult time, Rushdie maintains a sense of humor.
When a nurse tells him that her mother was supposed to attend the Chautauqua talk, Rushdie responds, “I think it’s OK not to be there. I would’ve liked not to be there.”
After he takes a stroll on his walker and is offered some water, the author has a different request: “I’d like a vodka tonic.”
On Day 18, he relocates to a rehab facility in Manhattan, and begins learning how to reuse the fingers in his left hand, after it took severe nerve damage that left the limb partly paralyzed. Eventually, he gets there.
Finally, after 40 days, Rushdie is allowed to return to his New York home.
“It feels extraordinary,” he says. “I come in on a stretcher and I’m leaving on my own two feet.”
At the end, Rushdie revisits the Chautauqua Institute stage for some closure, and the movie plays the footage of the barbaric act — crystal clear, close-up and in slow motion.
The Sundance viewers gasped and blurted out expressions of shock.
But, inspirationally, the video also shows many patrons sprinting to the writer’s aid.
Reflecting on that terrible day in summer 2022, Rushdie, back in front of a rapt crowd at Sundance, said that he saw all sides of humanity.
“I experienced, almost simultaneously, the worst side of human nature,” he said of his attacker, who wasn’t even born when the fatwa was put on Rushdie.
“On the other hand, [I saw] the best side of human nature, because the first people to save my life were the audience. If the audience had not jumped up on stage and jumped on him, we wouldn’t be having this chat.”
English (US)