"Alex Gibney's new documentary, Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, premiered at Sundance yesterday, with Rushdie himself in attendance and an understandably heightened security presence around the festival screening. Such an event was bound to be emotional - the picture features blood-chilling footage of the 2022 stabbing attack that nearly killed the author and left him blind in one eye - and the audience was clearly shaken and moved by the film."
"In 1989, Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini called for the assassination of Rushdie and anyone who had helped publish his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses. This declaration, this fatwa, had not been an empty one: Bookstores were set on fire; newspaper offices were bombed; Rushdie's Japanese translator was killed, his Italian translator was stabbed, and his Norwegian publisher was shot. A hotel in Sivas, Turkey, was set on fire by a mob enraged at a conference where Rushdie's Turkish translator, the great author Aziz Nesin, was due to speak. Thirty-seven people, mostly artists and scholars, died in the conflagration."
Alex Gibney's documentary Knife premiered at Sundance with Salman Rushdie in attendance and heightened security at the screening. The film includes blood-chilling footage of the 2022 stabbing attack that nearly killed Rushdie and left him blind in one eye, leaving audiences shaken. Knife interweaves multiple threads from Rushdie's life and career, functioning as both a biography and a history lesson. The documentary summarizes the 1989 fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini, and documents subsequent violence against translators and publishers, including killings, bombings, and the Sivas hotel arson that killed thirty-seven people. The film incorporates Rushdie's recovery footage filmed by his wife.
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