Reporting from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

On Aug. 12, 2022, Hadi Mater rushed the stage of the Chautauqua Institution in Western New York state and stabbed author Salman Rushdie multiple times in the face, neck, hand, and abdomen. “For 27 seconds,” Rushdie says, “we were intimately connected.”

Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, from director Alex Gibney, is an equally intimate documentary about the 401 days following the attack, primarily recorded on a prosumer camera by Rushdie’s wife, poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, as he recuperates from his wounds in a Pennsylvania hospital.

In addition to this new footage, Gibney reconstructs Rushdie’s career as an outsider in India and in his adopted home of London, and as a man living within the eye of the storm after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa on the author following the publication of The Satanic Verses. Muslims around the world, at least the ones who found themselves in front of news cameras, called for the death of Rushdie, and the author went into hiding. He did not, however, disappear altogether, and Gibney draws from a trove of archival footage to tell the Rushdie story.

Knife benefits greatly from this footage—the doc acts as an excellent primer of Rushdie and his work, in addition to being about his recovery. But the real coup here is when Rushdie and Griffiths return to the scene of the crime to recount and reenact the moments leading up to and during the attack at Chautauqua. Gibney intercuts archival footage of the attack on Aug. 12 with a recovered Rushdie explaining what he remembers from that day, while also taking the position of his attacker and walking in his shoes. That Rushdie does this in an empty auditorium with only Griffiths and her camera present transforms what could be a public performance into a personal healing moment for both. “A closing of the circle,” Rushdie says with a smile.

Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushie does not yet have a release date.