If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. And if life gives you a comedy character who mocks every element of your country, use his catchphrase for a tourism campaign.
That’s the thinking behind Kazakhstan’s latest promotional videos, which use Borat’s ‘Very nice!’ to describe several, well, very nice things in Kazakhstan.
Borat, a creation of British actor Sacha Baron Cohen, is a Kazakh ‘journalist’ who portrays his country as a backward, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, racist backwater.
But now the country has produced four 12-second videos aimed at showcasing its loveliness.
Kairat Sadvakassov, deputy chairman of Kazakh Tourism, said that Borat’s catchphrase ‘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.’
The campaign coincides with the release of the second Borat film: ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/business/kazakhstan-embraces-borat.html
