Kazakhstan now thinks Borat is “very nice.”
The former Soviet republic — which banned the first “Borat” movie in 2006 over Sacha Baron Cohen’s depiction of a Kazakh TV reporter — has come around for “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.”
And the country’s tourism board has decided to capitalize on the sequel by adopting the character’s famous catchphrase — “Very nice” — for a new campaign amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The board’s deputy chairman, Kairat Sadvakassov, told the New York Times that initially “the decision was made to let it die its natural death and not respond,” referring to the new flick.
“In COVID times, when tourism spending is on hold, it was good to see the country mentioned in the media. Not in the nicest way, but it’s good to be out there,” Sadvakassov told the paper.
The idea to create a tourism campaign based on the movie came from Dennis Keen of Los Angeles, who now lives in the Kazakh city of Almaty, where he gives walking tours and hosts a local travel show on TV, according to the Times.
“I’m kind of like the American Borat,” he told the Times.
“I’ve had a lot of free time,” he said. “Also, I just had a baby. When he grows up, I don’t want him to be ashamed of Borat. I want him to say, ‘That’s when my dad started this whole fun project.’”
When the trailer for the movie was released in September, Keen and a pal, Yermek Utemissov, pitched ads with the slogan “Kazakhstan. Very nice!” to the tourism board.
Once approved, they quickly shot four 12-second spots featuring the slogan for free.
In one, a local at a market drinks traditional fermented horse milk — not horse urine! — and exclaims, “That’s actually very nice.”
“This is a comedy, and the Kazakhstan in the film has nothing to do with the real country,” Baron Cohen told the Times in a statement.
“I chose Kazakhstan because it was a place that almost nobody in the US knew anything about, which allowed us to create a wild, comedic, fake world,” he said.
“The real Kazakhstan is a beautiful country with a modern, proud society — the opposite of Borat’s version.”
Sadvakassov said the beauty of Borat’s catchphrase is that it “offers the perfect description of Kazakhstan’s vast tourism potential in a short, memorable way.”
“Kazakhstan’s nature is very nice; its food is very nice; and its people, despite Borat’s jokes to the contrary, are some of the nicest in the world,” he told the Huffington Post.
“We would like everyone to come experience Kazakhstan for themselves by visiting our country in 2021 and beyond, so that they can see that Borat’s homeland is nicer than they may have heard.”