A wife's iPhone diary becomes the spine of a new Alex Gibney film on Rushdie's survival

An accidental archive

Rachel Eliza Griffiths did not set out to make a film. In August 2022, days after her husband Sir Salman Rushdie was stabbed multiple times on stage in New York state, she began recording his hospital treatment on her phone. Rushdie’s own request, by his account, was modest: a photograph every couple of days, a bare record that he had survived. What Griffiths produced instead was something closer to a diary, tracking a recovery that unfolded far more slowly, and with far more visible damage, than the writer had initially grasped.

That footage now anchors a new documentary by Alex Gibney, the prolific director behind films on Scientology, Theranos and Enron, who has taken Griffiths’s raw material and built a portrait of Rushdie’s “tumultuous life” around it, according to the Guardian’s account. The Guardian reports that Gibney has drawn on the structural techniques of Dennis Potter, the British writer known for blending timelines and registers in works such as The Singing Detective, to shape the material into something more than illness footage stitched to talking heads.

What the film actually shows

The details that are verifiable are narrow but striking: Griffiths, a poet and photographer working under her full name, chartered a plane to reach Rushdie’s bedside without knowing whether he was alive; the attack left him fighting for his life; and the video diary she began almost immediately captures the physical toll in a way that print interviews and public appearances since have not. Rushdie himself is quoted acknowledging that the damage was “much worse” than he had imagined at the time, a line that suggests the film’s value lies less in narrative revelation than in the unmediated visual record of a very public figure’s very private convalescence.

Beyond that, the Guardian piece is thin on the mechanics that usually matter to anyone assessing a documentary’s weight: no distributor, release date, running time or festival premiere is mentioned in the source material. What we have is a first-person account of the film’s genesis, not yet a film that critics or audiences have seen in full.

The catch

This is, on the face of it, a strong human story, attempted murder, survival, a marriage tested and deepened, an acclaimed director shaping intimate footage into art. But readers should be careful about what’s established here. This is access journalism built from the subjects’ own recollections, filtered through a single interview conducted presumably to promote the film. There’s no independent confirmation of Gibney’s Potter-inspired structural choices beyond his own or Rushdie’s characterisation, and nothing here about how the film was funded, who owns the footage, or what commercial terms, if any, attach to a video diary that began as a private act between spouses and is now, evidently, a licensed piece of content.

None of that undercuts the underlying facts of the attack and recovery, which are well documented elsewhere. But documentaries built from a subject’s own archive, produced with that subject’s cooperation, are not neutral records, they are collaborations with an interest in how the story lands. Gibney has a strong track record with difficult, well-sourced subjects, and Griffiths’s footage sounds like a genuine find rather than a stunt. Whether the finished film holds up as cinema, rather than as a moving curiosity attached to a famous survival story, is a question nobody can answer until it’s actually released.