Anyone who’s watched Borat is familiar with the country of Kazakhstan. The home country of Borat Sagdiyev (played by Sacha Baron Cohen), has adopted the character’s catchphrase “Very Nice” for a new tourism campaign.
Even though the Borat film may have not have depicted Kazakhstan in the most accurate and flattering ways, the deputy chairman of Kazakh Tourism said in a statement to the Huffington Post that adopting Borat’s catchphrase in the campaign “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. 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,” he said.
In the ad we see tourist hiking with selfie sticks saying, “Very Nice”, drinking fermented horse milk saying, “Mm, that’s actually very nice!”, looking at architecture saying, “Wow, very nice!”, and posing for photograph with Kazakhs in traditional dress saying, “That’s very nice!”.
The idea for the campaign came from American Dennis Keen and his friend Yermek Utemissov, who traveled to the country on a high school exchange and studied with a Kazakh professor at Stanford University.
While the Kazakhstan government was at first upset with the way they were portrayed in Borat, years later they thanked Sacha Baron Cohen for boosting tourism to the country. In 2012, Yerzhan Kazykhanov, the foreign minister at the time, said that 10 times more people were applying for vias to go to Kazakhstan.
And after watching the catchy tourism campaign, we want to visit the country as well. Check out the video below.
