Nearly 14 years after the world was introduced to the chaos of Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Borat Margaret Sagdiyev, Kazakhstan has finally gotten on board with their unofficial correspondent to the rest of the world and revealed a new tourism slogan. If you’re wondering, yes it is very nice indeed.
In a series of four short videos, the Kazakh tourism board has declared the transcontinental country as a very nice place to visit and explore.
Finally, after years of the tourism board and the wider republic of Kazakhstan being deeply unsure if Borat is a good representation of the glorious nation, it’s leaned right in and accepted that well, yeah, Kazakhstan is very nice indeed.
And thus the “Kazakhstan. Very nice!” slogan was birthed.
The videos, which all go for about 15 seconds each, show different tourists exploring the country’s snow-capped mountains, bustling produce markets, proud cultural heritage and traditions, and bafflingly futuristic architecture (a far cry from what we saw in the 2006 Borat film) while exclaiming how “very nice” each experience is.
I mean, it’s no “waa waa wee waa” reply to seeing the splendours that Kazakhstan has to offer, but I’ll take it.
The new tourism slogan for the Central Asian country comes days after the second Borat film was released on Amazon Prime, and a day after reports emerged that some Kazakh residents aren’t super stoked with the Borat franchise.
As per Al Jazeera, a petition with over 100,000 signatures calling to ‘cancel Borat’, with thousands of Kazakhs alleging the film and the character of racism, and that it was offensive to the nation.
Official letter to @PrimeVideo from Kazakh-American diaspora regarding the release of #Borat2 movie. #WeAreNotYourJoke #RacismStillExists #racism #cancelborat2 #cancelborat #qazaqstan #qazaq #казахстан #SachaBaronCohen pic.twitter.com/num1jsnX4A
— Gia Noortas | Гауhар Нұртас (@GiaNoortas) October 25, 2020
When the sequel film premiered on October 23, groups gathered in front of the US consulate in the Kazakh city of Almaty to protest the film, and the Kazakh-American community sent a letter to Prime Video damning the film’s release.
