Alex Gibney’s documentary follows the celebrated author’s life up to and after the attack, but what shines through is Rushdie’s remarkable courage

The terrifying, inspiring story of how Salman Rushdie survived and thrived after the assassination attempt on him in New York in 2022 is the subject of this excellent documentary from Alex Gibney. It is based on Rushdie’s own memoir, narrated extensively by the author himself, and using the intimate hospital-bedside video footage shot by his wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths. There are stomach-turningly explicit shots of Rushdie’s damaged eye and also, finally, horrendous scenes of the attack itself. What emerges is Rushdie’s courage and his remarkably level-headed, calm and unafraid writerly voice insisting on the primacy of literature, freedom of expression and the life of the imagination.

The film itself takes us from Rushdie’s childhood in Mumbai (with a certain unselfconscious locution of his class and background, Rushdie still calls it “Bombay”), to the years of bullying and unhappiness at an English public school, then Cambridge, London, his day job in advertising (he is cheerfully delighted by his successful campaign for Aero chocolate). Then there is writing fiction and the big breakthrough with his magic-realist creation myth Midnight’s Children. We get a lot of footage of him in black-tie at awards, which is how he appeared in the media: a crude jihadi placard actually shows him in a bow tie.

After ​the writer was stabbed in a horrific attack, his wife started making a video diary of his recovery. The clips are featured in a new film from Alex Gibney, who drew on Dennis Potter to create a powerful portrait of Rushdie’s tumultuous life

Eliza Griffiths was at home in New York, drinking a second cup of coffee one August morning in 2022, when her phone rang. She answered it to a frantic friend, who told her the man she had married just a year earlier, and who had set off the previous night for a speaking engagement nearly 400 miles away, had been hurt. “What kind of hurt?” she panicked. Turning on the television, she was assaulted by blurry images of chaos on stage as audience members surged to the rescue. Her husband, Sir Salman Rushdie, had been stabbed multiple times and was fighting for his life.

Within days of desperately chartering a plane to fly her to Rushdie’s hospital bedside, not knowing if he was alive or dead, Griffiths – a poet and photographer who works under her full name Rachel Eliza Griffiths – had begun to make a video diary recording his treatment and recovery. “When it had become likely that I was going to survive,” says Rushdie drily, “I said to Eliza we need to make a record of this. By which I meant something very modest: maybe she would take a picture of me on her iPhone every couple of days just to document the recovery, but Eliza had bigger ideas.”

The author explores themes of legacy, mortality and loneliness in the first work of fiction since his near-fatal attack

Five short stories and five readers make up Salman Rushdie’s collection, The Eleventh Hour, his first work of fiction since the near-fatal attack in 2022 where he sustained life-changing injuries. These tales find the author exploring legacy, mortality, loneliness and the ageing process. In these potentially bleak themes, Rushdie finds levity and laughter, as well as profundity.

Late, read by the actor Naveen Andrews, is a ghost story set in King’s College, Cambridge, where an honorary fellow, SM Arthur, wakes up dead in his college room and wonders if he will be trapped there for eternity. He meets a lonely but very much alive Indian student, Rosa, who is stuck at college for the holidays. Sid Sagar reads The Old Man in the Piazza, an allegory about free speech and how “we have become bar room moralists. Does the thumb point upward. Does it turn down? … We are all now gladiators in the Colosseum of the Thumb.”

Old favourites Shaun the Sheep, Dune, Jane Austen and Godzilla join Charles de Gaulle, the Peasants’ Revolt and queer identity in Spain

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All release dates are UK and subject to change

Willem Dafoe is typically grizzled and poetic for this study of a near-retirement postal worker who, it turns out, was a beatnik rhymester of cachet – but no lasting renown – back in the day, and who has now been rediscovered by a new generation of literary hipsters. Director Kent Jones, adapting a novella by Arthur “La Ronde” Schnitzler, was the longtime head of the New York film festival; he might be in for a spot of late fame himself. AP
• 4 September

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some wonderful new paperbacks, from a short story collection by a literary great to razor-sharp criticism

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Hadi Matar, already serving 25 years for attempted murder, denies federal charges that could bring a life sentence

The man who stabbed Salman Rushdie in the eye on stage in 2022 is standing trial for a second time – this time facing terrorism charges after being found guilty of attempted murder and sentenced to 25 years in prison last year.

Hadi Matar’s federal trial begins in Buffalo, New York on Wednesday, about 70 miles from the venue where Rushdie was due to speak about writers in political exile in August 2022, when he was stabbed more than a dozen times.

Author says he doesn’t ‘feel symbolic’ and hopes to steer narrative to his books after surviving assassination attempt

Salman Rushdie said he’s tired of being everyone’s “free speech Barbie” four years after the author survived an assassination attempt that left him blinded in his right eye.

“It’s a subject I’m anxious to change,” Rushdie said Friday during a talk with the Atlantic’s George Packer at Tulane University’s New Orleans book festival. “I don’t feel symbolic.

Exit of Devyani Saltzman, described as Barbican’s ‘driving force’, announced a few weeks after arrival of new CEO

Salman Rushdie, John Akomfrah and Pankaj Mishra are among more than 170 cultural figures who have signed an open letter to the Barbican expressing concern over the departure of its arts director, Devyani Saltzman.

Saltzman, who became director of arts and participation at the Barbican in February 2024, is leaving the institution amid a significant leadership change a few weeks after its new CEO joined.

Sundance film festival: a new documentary explores the author’s physical and spiritual healing from the 2022 knife attack that almost killed him

On 12 August 2022, as Salman Rushdie was about to launch into a lecture on the importance of protecting writers from harm at New York’s Chautauqua Institution, a man in a black mask rushed the stage with a knife. To the horror of the packed amphitheater, the man stabbed the Indian-born British-American author – once the subject of an infamous fatwa from the leader of Iran in the 1980s – 15 times in the face, neck and torso, before members of the audience rushed the stage and disarmed him. Rushdie survived, narrowly; the stabbing left him on a ventilator, severed tendons in his left hand, and cost him his right eye.

A full recreation of that attack from Rushdie’s perspective — 27 seconds of struggle, the mysterious man’s face, several sickening punches of blade — opens a new documentary on Rushdie’s recovery and resilience, which drew a standing ovation at the Sundance film festival. Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, directed by Alex Gibney and based on Rushdie’s memoir of the same name, is unsparing on the devastating results of the stabbing: in never-before-seen footage recorded by the author’s wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Rushdie appears gruesomely disfigured — his skin discolored, his entire abdomen bisected by stitches, his swollen neck held together by stitches, his eye indescribably mangled. His first coherent thought after regaining consciousness, he recalls in the film, was simply: “We need to document this.”

The death of a friend and the attempted murder of her husband Salman Rushdie loom large in the poet’s moving memoir

The night before her wedding to Salman Rushdie in 2021, the American poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths was fretting about her best friend. Kamilah Aisha Moon was due to read a poem at the ceremony, but no one had heard from her. Her phone was going straight to voicemail and staff at her hotel said she hadn’t checked in. “We’ll find her. She wouldn’t miss your wedding,” Griffiths’s sister, Melissa, assured her. But the next afternoon, in the middle of her wedding reception, Griffiths learned that Moon had died alone at home in Atlanta of unknown causes. On hearing the news she collapsed, hit her head on a table and blacked out. Paramedics pried open her eyes to shine a torch on them: “A particle of light that is so distant from the world I once knew.”

For Griffiths, 47, the death of her best friend and “chosen sister” was one in a series of upheavals stretching across a decade. It began with the death of her mother, who was her greatest cheerleader and fiercest critic. She had instilled in her daughter the importance of “independence above everything. I was raised not to lose myself in the stories of others, especially men.”

Major new films promise to reveal more about the lives of public figures, provocative topics and historical events

The landscape for nonfiction cinema is swift, fragile and constantly in flux in these absurd times; films we discuss now may not be released, and films we discuss a year from now may not even be the germ of an idea yet. But between the usual stable of celebrity retrospectives, music documentaries and the ongoing work to record the atrocities in Gaza, the documentary slate for 2026 already seems both full and promising. From the assassination attempt on Salman Rushdie to AI, a Billie Jean King retrospective to Elon Musk, here are 10 of the most hotly anticipated documentaries in 2026.

Über Ali Chamenei, Irans Obersten Führer, weiß man wenig, auch wenn er seit 1989 regiert. Jetzt ist eine erste Biografie in deutscher Sprache erschienen. Über den Protagonisten erfährt man darin nicht viel Neues, dafür aber Details aus der Geschichte der Islamischen Republik.