Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie

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VERMONT PREMIERE 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.

Biography Alex Gibney:

Director Alex Gibney, called “the most important documentarian of our time” by Esquire Magazine, has a signature cinematic style that lends itself to penetrating, gripping, and deeply insightful documentaries.

Alex’s work has been the recipient of an Academy Award, multiple Emmy Awards, a Grammy Award, several Peabody Awards, the DuPont-Columbia Award, The Independent Spirit Award and The Writers Guild Awards. In 2013, Alex was honoured with the International Documentary Association’s (IDA) Career Achievement Award, in 2015 the inaugural Christopher Hitchens Prize, the Robert J. Flaherty Award in 2019 and Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival Career Achievement Award in 2020.

Gibney’s films include the triple Emmy and Peabody award-winning Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, the most-watched non-music HBO documentary; the Academy Award-winning Taxi to The Dark Side, the Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, the multiple Emmy Award-winning Mea Maxima Culpa; the Peabody award-winning Zero Days; No Stone Unturned which was nominated for WGA Award for Best Documentary Screenplay and an Emmy award for Outstanding Investigative Documentary; Sinatra: All or Nothing at All, a two-part special on legendary entertainer Frank Sinatra, and Rolling Stone: Stories from the Edge, co-directed by Blair Foster. He executive produced and directed the first episode of The Looming Tower, a popular Hulu drama series based on Lawrence Wright’s book of the same name.

His film The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley was nominated for an Emmy Award for Best Documentary and won the WGA Award for Best Documentary Screenplay and Citizen K world premiered at 76th Venice International Film Festival in 2019 and was released theatrically this year. His recent films include the well-received Crazy, Not Insane, at the recent Venice Film Festival which will air on HBO in November, Agents of Chaos, a two-part documentary about Russian meddling in the 2016 US elections (HBO, 23rd & 24th September), and Totally Under Control, a searing look at the administration’s failure to contain the COVID 19 pandemic releasing in October.

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