We Will Sue You Into the Ground, Mr. Cohen
When Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan hit US theaters on November 3, 2006, the Kazakhstani government was in no mood to laugh. The mockumentary, directed by Larry Charles and starring Sacha Baron Cohen as fictional Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev, portrayed the Central Asian nation as breathtakingly backward. Officials banned the film domestically, revoked access to Baron Cohen’s website, threatened legal action, and purchased a four-page advertisement in American newspapers, including the New York Times, to tell the world what Kazakhstan was actually like.
Then, in April 2012, Foreign Minister Yerzhan Kazykhanov stood before parliament and said he was grateful to Borat for helping attract tourists to Kazakhstan.
Five and a half years. Same film. Completely reversed position.
Thanked for What, Exactly?
Baron Cohen never apologized. The film was never edited. The portrayal was every bit as crude in April 2012 as it had been in November 2006. Stranger still: the country that felt so misrepresented wasn’t even filmed on its own soil. The outdoor scenes Western audiences watched as “Kazakhstan” were shot in Romania, in the village of Glod in Dâmbovița County, and in nearby Moroeni and Bucharest. Romanian villages stood in for a fictional Central Asian republic, and most audiences had no idea. So a film that lampooned a country, used a different country as its stage set, and sparked an international diplomatic row somehow ended up being credited as a net positive by the very government it had enraged.
The One Thing Borat Actually Did
Kazykhanov’s explanation to parliament was fairly direct: before the film, many Westerners had no mental image of Kazakhstan at all. A country that doesn’t exist in your head cannot interest you. After Borat, which grossed roughly $262.6 million worldwide on an $18 million budget and then circulated for years on DVD and cable, Kazakhstan existed in the minds of millions who had never previously given it a thought. For a meaningful number of those people, curiosity followed the mockery. Kazykhanov cited a tenfold increase in visa applications as evidence, telling parliament: “I am grateful to Borat for helping attract tourists to Kazakhstan.” The mechanism is almost boringly straightforward: you cannot be curious about a place you have never heard of.
What the Numbers Tell Us, and What They Don’t
The tenfold visa figure is striking, but precision matters. It came from a government minister’s parliamentary statement, not an independent statistical body. Visa applications are not the same as visas granted, and granted visas are not the same as tourists who actually arrived. The causal link, that Borat caused the increase, was asserted rather than demonstrated. Kazakhstan’s international profile was also rising through trade and sports during this period, and isolating the film’s contribution from those factors isn’t possible from available information.
The Accidental Advertisement
What the Borat case illustrates is a principle that feels counterintuitive but holds up: in an environment where attention is scarce, name recognition carries value regardless of the emotional charge attached to it. The prerequisite for any travel interest is simply that a place exists somewhere in a person’s memory. Satire lodges names efficiently, because it generates strong emotion, and strong emotion is precisely what the brain uses to flag something as worth remembering.
Kazakhstan didn’t choose this advertising, and its government was entirely entitled to object. But by 2020, when Borat Subsequent Moviefilm was released on Amazon Prime Video, Kazakhstan’s tourist board had adopted Borat’s catchphrase “Very Nice!” as an official tourism slogan. From four-page newspaper rebuttals to co-opting the catchphrase as a national brand: the full arc of that relationship took roughly fourteen years.