Rome Film Fest 2026: Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie (dir. Alex Gibney) | Review

In August 2022, Rushdie was giving a talk in upstate New York when a man from New Jersey rushed the stage and repeatedly stabbed the writer in an attempted murder, driven by the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, almost a decade before the 24-year-old attacker was even born.

Not having read Rushdie’s memoir, I went into the screening at Rome Film Fest with no thoughts of adaptation comparison, (happily, as all too often I find they can ruin a viewing experience). The film is narrated mostly by Rushdie himself, interspersed with intimate hospital-bedside clips shot by his wife, poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. The filmmakers don’t shy away from the footage of the attack itself, nor from the physical damage to Rushdie, which is so horrific as to often be genuinely difficult to watch.

Whilst structured around the stabbing incident, the documentary reflects back on the entirety of Rushdie’s truly remarkable life, from his childhood in Mumbai to English boarding school and Cambridge, The Satanic Verses controversy, years in hiding, then his return to public life and move to New York. Revelations about his father’s alcoholism, his ambiguous relationship to class and race (in particular his comments on arriving in the elite English education system from an upper-middle-class Indian family) are elegantly and eloquently expressed, whilst steering clear of a cheap “tell-all” exposé, keeping much of his private life (children, previous marriages…) at arm’s length.

The use of archive is wonderful, with fantastic footage of India accompanying discussions of Midnight’s Children, and while the animated on-screen text felt a little cheesy at times, the direct quotations from Rushdie’s earlier work add enormously to the film.

The documentary also offers a sharp commentary on how Rushdie has been discussed and framed by cultural and political figures over the years, among them Boris Johnson, Edward Said, and Presidents Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden. Combined with news segments from the period of The Satanic Verses controversy and its aftermath, this powerfully underlines Rushdie’s significance and the ambivalence that has so often surrounded him.

It was interesting to see Rushdie keen to dispute his reputation as an intellectually dense, high-minded figure, and the documentary does a great job of presenting him as an unique mind of his generation, but also as fun, music-loving, passionate and excitable (captured in his delight at his role in the successful Aero chocolate campaign from his advertising days.)

Rushdie’s written work is notoriously difficult to read, but this documentary offers an accessible, deeply moving account of what is surely one of the most fascinating and complex lives of any writer alive today.

With propaganda and censorship on the rise, Rushdie’s refusal to be silenced and his insistence that literature and the imagination are worth defending make Knife not only a fascinating story but a prescient political film that audiences around the world should go and see.

The 21st edition of the Rome Film Fest is running from October 13th to 25th, 2026.