On an August morning in 2022, Rachel Eliza Griffiths was on her second cup of coffee in her New York apartment when the call came — frantic, barely coherent — telling her that her husband of just one year had been hurt somewhere on a stage nearly four hundred miles away. She switched on the television and watched, in mounting horror, as blurred footage showed audience members rushing toward a man who had been stabbed multiple times in front of them. That man was Sir Salman Rushdie, one of the most celebrated and most threatened novelists alive, and he was fighting for his life. Within days of chartering an emergency flight to reach his bedside — not knowing, as the plane climbed, whether he would still be breathing when she landed — Griffiths had already begun reaching for the one instrument she trusted most: a camera.

When the equipment arrived in its cardboard box, she wept. "It was reconnecting me to my identity as an artist," she has said. "The person I used to be, even just twenty-four hours ago, was being returned to me." What Rushdie had imagined as a modest iPhone diary, taken every few days to document his recovery, became something far more searching in his wife's hands — a sustained, unflinching visual record of survival itself.

The footage now forms the spine of a new documentary, Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, which weaves Griffiths' intimate video diary together with archive material reaching back to 1989, when Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa calling for the execution of the forty-one-year-old author and his publishers, on the grounds that his novel The Satanic Verses had insulted Islam.