He is to talk of his experiences as a student at the screening of the film at the Frank Cody Lounge on Wednesday, which coincides with the United Nations Humanitarian Day.
Mr Rowhani had completed high school and had earlier started at the institute, which was founded in 1987, but his studies were "interrupted when I was 19 years old, due to being arrested by security forces along with my mother for being a Baha'i".
Although many of his friends also studied at the institute, his only sibling, a sister, had left Iran and settled in New Zealand before the BHIE was established. "I received a couple of accusations and one of them was for studying at the BIHE. Another was contacting Baha'is outside of Iran because I was hosting a non-Baha'i Kiwi friend of my sister from Palmerston North, who visited us in Iran as a tourist. All of my classmates at the last year of high school were studying hard to sit for the entrance exam of tertiary education.
"However, I knew I was not going to be allowed to sit for that exam as this was the case of all the Baha'i youths. My entrance application was declined that year and the year after.
"This was quite a feeling of exclusion on one hand and at the same time a feeling of determination to fight back and to resist such discrimination. The BIHE gave me an opportunity to resist."
A core principle of the Baha'i faith is compulsory and universal education, he said, and the institute was a flowering of that belief for the Baha'i community in Iran.
He said greater than the threat of being arrested himself was the risk of "trouble for others who support you to study", including Baha'i families who offered their homes for use as a classroom or lab, or exam venue for a couple of hours, and the volunteer Baha'i lecturers who risk long jail sentences.
"We, as students, were leaving such places, sometimes one by one, cautiously avoiding anything that could attract any attention of neighbours and potentially putting the owner of the house at risk."
Mr Rowhani, who was one of the institute's first crop of computer science graduates, had come to New Zealand to undertake postgraduate studies that were not available through the BHIE.
He was continuing his education in New Zealand, and work as a remote tutor for the BHIE, with the over-arching aim of returning to Iran to teach.
"It is my dream to be able to return to Iran and to serve that country not only the Baha'is," he said. "Sharing my story of the BIHE is not depicting an image of a victim in your mind. Neither is it my intention to incite hatred towards anyone.
"It was a story of a severely persecuted minority that refused to take a role of victim, refused to be dehumanised, refused to take any revenge, refused to react by civil disobedience. The Baha'i community of Iran resisted educational exclusion by establishing their own university; it is a successful model of constructive resilience in response to ongoing oppression over a 35-year period."
The free public screening of the 55-minute film will be preceded by a question and answers session with Mr Rowhani from 7pm at the Frank Cody Lounge in the Masterton Town Hall on Wednesday.
