A new documentary about the near-fatal stabbing of novelist Salman Rushdie received a standing ovation at the Sundance Film Festival on Sunday, the Washington Post reports.
The festival screened Alex Gibney’s Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, which shares a similar title to Rushdie’s 2024 memoir about the attack, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. The film appeared to shock audiences with its shots of Rushdie’s wounds.
Rushdie was stabbed multiple times while preparing to deliver a lecture in Chautauqua, New York, in August 2022. Hadi Matar was convicted of attempted murder and assault in connection with the attack and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
The documentary Knife tells the story of Rushdie’s recovery following the attack, featuring graphic video footage filmed by his wife, poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, who wrote about the assault in her book The Flower Bearers, published last week by Random House. The Post reports that the film also incorporates archival footage from news accounts of the fatwa issued against Rushdie by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after publication of the author’s 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses. Khomeini condemned the novel as sacrilegious, and Matar hinted that the fatwa might have inspired his attack.
Audience members at Sundance weren’t the only ones impressed by the film. At TheWrap, critic Zachary Lee wrote of the documentary, “We need art like this documentary that reminds us that resistance is not just possible, but necessary.” And the Daily Beast’s Nick Schager called it “a stirring testament to both [Rushdie's] resilience and to freedom as a vital bulwark against the forces of extremism and evil.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
