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This year\u2019s Melbourne International Film Festival has kicked off. Here we take a closer look at some of what\u2019s on offer. See all stories.<\/a><\/p>\n As Salman Rushdie lay in hospital after being repeatedly stabbed on stage<\/a> in August 2022, his wife Rachel Eliza Griffiths started filming. Asking if he was OK with that, he told her yes. \u201cWe need to document this.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, Alex Gibney<\/a> has turned that raw, unflinching and often hard-to-watch footage into Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, one of the most confronting, but ultimately hopeful, movies you\u2019ll ever see.<\/p>\n \u201cOn this film, I acted mostly as an editor,\u201d says the prolific documentarian who won an Oscar (with Australian producer Eva Orner<\/a>) for Taxi to the Dark Side in 2007 and has five Emmy wins to his name.<\/p>\n \u201cMy agent told me Salman and Eliza were interested in talking to me, and I learned they had this footage that Eliza took, starting on day five of his recovery and going right up to when they returned to the scene of the crime. And the first question I asked them was, \u2018Why don\u2019t you do it? No one knows more about what happened than you do\u2019. And they said, \u2018Well, that\u2019s the problem. We feel too close to it. We want somebody else to come in and see if they can figure out a way to reckon with it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Gibney pitched an approach informed by The Singing Detective, the 1986 BBC drama series written by Dennis Potter, in which Michael Gambon<\/a> played a bed-bound writer in hospital whose medication produces a blurring of his imaginative world and his memories.<\/p>\n Despite its complex (and much-praised) structure, the show could be boiled down, says Gibney, to a pretty simple idea: a guy who is sick gets better, but along the way he reimagines his life through hallucinations and his detective fiction.<\/p>\n Rushdie, who had not yet decided to write his own account of the incident (his book Knife: Meditation on an Attempted Murder<\/a> was released in August 2024), liked the idea, and the film Gibney has made \u2013 with Griffiths credited as executive producer and principal cinematographer \u2013 serves both as an account of the attack and its aftermath and as a meditation on Rushdie\u2019s life more broadly.<\/p>\n Knife opens with a recreation of the attack, with Rushdie asking in voiceover, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t I fight back?\u201d It\u2019s a shocking way to start, but it\u2019s nothing compared to what follows.<\/p>\n The Booker Prize winner was in a chair on the stage of the Chautauqua Institution<\/a> in New York State, about to be interviewed, when a man armed with a knife rushed up the steps and lunged at him. The attacker, Hadi Matar<\/a>, stabbed the novelist 15 times, landing blows in his neck, stomach, chest and thigh. One of them struck Rushdie, who was 76 at the time, in his right eye (he has lost all sight in it).<\/p>\n Matar had been inspired by the fatwa issued by Iran in 1989 in response to Rushdie\u2019s novel The Satanic Verses, which Ayatollah Khomeini and his fellow clerics had deemed blasphemous. (Iran\u2019s position on the fatwa has since become somewhat ambiguous, but it has never officially been rescinded. Last month a trial on terrorism charges against Matar \u2013 who has already been convicted of attempted murder \u2013 began in Buffalo, New York.)<\/p>\n The film also includes real footage of the attack, which was only released during Matar\u2019s first trial in February 2025. It\u2019s horrendous in its brutality, and Gibney admits he wasn\u2019t sure that he should even include it.<\/p>\n \u201cI mean, for a documentarian, it would be very hard not to show the actual crime, but I did ponder that maybe we shouldn\u2019t,\u201d he says. What got him over the line was the footage Griffiths had shot of her and Rushdie returning to Chautauqua, \u201cand within that context it seemed to make sense to show it\u201d.<\/p>\n The most challenging scenes in the film, though, are probably the shots of Rushdie\u2019s horribly disfigured eyeball, bulging from its socket, occluded, pointing wildly out of focus. \u201cTrust me,\u201d says Gibney, \u201cin a theatre you can hear the whole audience go \u2018aagh\u2019. It\u2019s very difficult to watch.\u201d<\/p>\n There was never any chance of not including that footage, though. \u201cBoth of them [Rushdie and Griffiths] felt very strongly that they wanted to show this is what terrorism looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n For all that Griffiths\u2019 footage was the rock on which the film is built, Gibney knew he had to go beyond it to tell the story he had in mind.<\/p>\n \u201cToo much of that, and it\u2019s only about his physical recovery, rather than a deeper kind of mental recovery,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd once you enter the mind, it\u2019s a chaotic and unpredictable place, and you have to sort of go with the flow.\u201d<\/p>\n In archival footage, interviews from across the decades and in his own scripted narration, Rushdie reflects on being an outsider in his own family in Mumbai, of feeling the lash of racism at the English boarding school (Rugby) to which he was sent by his father when he was 14, of the cold shoulder some in the literary establishment turned on him when Iran called for his murder, with the offer of a massive bounty (starting at $1 million, it eventually rose to $6 million).<\/p>\n There\u2019s a sense overall of a man wounded many times in his life, and of his attempt to stitch himself back together in spite of it all. Whatever you might think of Rushdie, it\u2019s impossible not to be moved by his resilience, his unflinching commitment to free speech, and his refusal of hatred.<\/p>\n Ultimately, Gibney says, the film he made \u201cwasn\u2019t about the record of an attack, it was about how you reckon with the attack. And one way of reckoning with it is to go back to that moment and relive it in a way that you can be kind of outside it and not succumb to overwhelming dread.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a kind of curative aspect to it,\u201d Gibney adds. \u201cThis is what recovery looks like.\u201d<\/p>\n Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie screens at the Melbourne International Film Festival on August 18 and 20 and at Sydney Festival of Dangerous Ideas on August 20. Details: miff.com.au<\/a> and festivalofdangerousideas.com<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Staff](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/6de6c0bdf6bf9730ea97aee999f06dd01cf827f4.jpeg\")
Staff and audience members come to Rushdie\u2019s aid at the Chautauqua Institution on August 12, 2022.AP<\/p>\n![\"Rushdie\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/dcf5e147eb8d5224ba74ac937049c9426104ff21.jpeg\")
Rushdie\u2019s wife,\u00a0Rachel Eliza Griffiths, began filming from five days after the attack. They had been married less than a year when it happened.Getty<\/p>\n