The capital of Kazakhstan is indeed, very nice.
Once upon a time, there was a movie about a fictional Kazakh newsman named Borat Sagdiyev who traveled around America punking folks into revealing something very unflattering about their character.
The year was 2006, and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan went on to make over $262 million at the box office. The film was all about exposing Americans at their worst, but the Kazakhs didn’t get the joke.
The former Soviet republic banned the mockumentary and took out a four-page ad in The New York Times defending its national honor. The government also threatened to sue the film’s creator, Sacha Baron Cohen, for depicting the Kazakhstani people as anti-Semitic, mysogynistic troglodytes who drank fermented horse urine. Go figure.
But then something funny happened: The film turned out to be a huge boon for Kazakhstan’s tourism industry. The embassy’s website traffic doubled in the month following the movie’s release and, over the next several years, the number of Kazakhstan’s tourist visas grew tenfold. Kazakh travel agencies began offering tours with names like “Kazakhstan vs. Boratistan” and “Jagshemash!!! See the Real Kazakhstan.”
Now, 14 years later, Borat is back with a new hit film on Amazon Prime with all the old stereotypes intact. It opens with Borat doing hard labor in prison, a punishment for his misdeeds in the first film. “Kazakhstan become laughing stocks around the world,” says the voice-over.
This time around, however, Kazakhstan is capitalizing on the opportunity by rolling out a brand new tourism slogan that’s one of Borat’s favorite catchphrases.
Yesterday, Kazakh Tourism released a series of 12-second ads that show visitors experiencing the central Asian country’s landscapes, architecture, food and culture while uttering Borat’s favorite sound bite: “Very nice.”
“How can you describe a place this surprising in just two words?” reads the caption below the YouTube video. “As a wise man once said, ‘Very nice!’”
“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,” said Kairat Sadvakassov, deputy chairman of Kazakh Tourism, in a statement. “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.”
And so, it seems, ends an unfortunate misunderstanding. “The joke is not on Kazakhstan,” Cohen told Rolling Stone in 2006. “I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist – who believe that there’s a country where homosexuals wear blue hats and the women live in cages and they drink fermented horse urine and the age of consent has been raised to nine years old.”
Sadvakassov recently told The New York Times that the Kazakhstan tourism board would love to have Cohen film there.
“This is a comedy, and the Kazakhstan in the film has nothing to do with the real country,” responded Cohen. “The real Kazakhstan is a beautiful country with a modern, proud society — the opposite of Borat’s version.”
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