"Rosewater" - Ventura Film Society, Thursday, May 14

The powerful 2014 drama, “Rosewater,” written & directed by Jon Stewart, is based on the memoir “Then They Came for Me” by Maziar Bahari and Aimee Molloy. The film recounts the 2009 arrest and imprisonment of Iranian-born Canadian journalist Bahari (Gael Garcia Bernal), who returned to his native country to interview Mir-Hossein Moussavi, the prime challenger to incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When Moussavi's supporters protested Ahmadinejad's declaration of victory, Bahari smuggled footage of the riots to the BBC. His participation in an interview on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” that same year was presented as evidence that Bahari was in communication with an American spy. He was arrested by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and interrogated and tortured for 118 days by an official known only as "Rosewater" (the chilling Kim Bodnia).