You are hereBorat’s show will go on
Borat’s show will go on
Kazakhstan became familiar to the world in 2006 as a result of the scandalous fictional character “Borat.” The government of Kazakhstan has tried hard to discredit him but, in fact, it’s just promoting him. (Literally, in some cases! Check out neweurasia’s coverage of this ridiculous story.)
Kazakhstani movie director Erkin Rakishev will produce “a worthy response” to Borat, Lenta.ru reports. The story is about “John,” an American who watched the “Borat” film and decided to check out Kazakhstan himself. While in Kazakhstan he realizes that “everything is not as [bad] as described in the movie.”
“We want to use Borat’s success. By using its popularity in the West, we want to show westerners a real Kazakhstan and not the one created by Sasha Cohen,” Rakishev explained.
According to him a Hollywood company is already interested in it. Work on the movie will start this autumn and it’s slated for screening in Spring 2011.
The show must go on!
While I think the central concept may have some merit-- following a character whose only exposure to the word "Kazakhstan" came from the Borat film, which in reality had nothing whatsoever to do with the real Kazakhstan, and might well have used a made-up name instead-- I wonder if it really needs to be connected to the earlier film at all.
A great many ridiculous things are said in that film, and the joke is on the credulous Americans who believe them without question because they've never heard of Kazakhstan. However, I've often thought that a line by line comparison of Borat's imaginary Kazakhstan and the real one is not the kind of comparison anyone ought to be inviting. For many people, anything different is strange and perhaps unappetizing. Somehow I imagine that audiences won't necessarily be won over once they find out people in Kazakhstan drink fermented horse milk, rather than fermented horse urine. To locals, of course, the latter is plainly disgusting and the former absolutely normal, and while I expect most Americans would clearly be able to rank the two in a hierarchy, they might not consider either particularly appetizing unless they are open-minded.
Likewise I am not so sure that an full an accurate portrayal of life on the steppe, or even in any of Kazakhstan's cities outside of Almaty and Astana, would be that much more flattering than the Romanian village used in the film (minus the extremely odd characters, of course.)
Why not straight up make a film that promotes Kazakhstan on its merits, and on the reality, without reference to Borat at all?