Uh-oh:
Kazakhstan fights back ahead of Borat film release Dan Glaister in Los Angeles
Thursday September 28, 2006
The Guardian
Kazakhstan: land of superstition, religious intolerance, political suppression and goats. Wrong. Kazakhstan is actually a country of metals and machinery, an outward-looking, modern nation with a stable economy that attracts foreign investors to its cosmopolitan capital.
The Kazakh government took the unusual step yesterday of publishing a four-page colour supplement in the New York Times in what appeared to be in part an attempt to head off the fallout from a satirical film due out in November. Borat: Cultural Leanings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is the latest work from Ali G creator Sacha Baron Cohen. The film lampoons the central Asian nation through Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh journalist who travels to the US to report on local customs.
Before leaving he introduces the audience to his sister, "number four prostitute in whole of Kazakhstan", and shows the village tradition of "the running of the Jew", a variation on Pamplona's bull running. Once in the US he releases chickens on the New York subway, mangles the Star Spangled Banner before a rodeo audience and abandons his pursuit of local tradition for a quest to meet Pamela Anderson.
Festival audiences have found the film hilarious, raising expectations that it will be a hit. But the Kazakh government is not amused. Since the Borat character first appeared it has protested and threatened legal action against the depiction of Kazakhstan as a backward haven for anti-Semites.
To counter the image of its country in the film - which was shot in the US and Romania - the government has funded a $50m tribal epic called Nomad.The Kazakh president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, was due to arrive in the US yesterday for a trip that will include a meeting with President George Bush.
