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Film

Kazakh leader: Stop brooding over 'Borat'

By TIMES WIRES
Published October 20, 2006

After spending weeks watching his countrymen demonstrate that they can't take a joke, a top Kazakh official is telling them it does no good to get hysterical about being parodied in what could become one of the biggest movies this year. "We must have a sense of humor and respect other people's freedom of creativity," Deputy Foreign Minister Rakhat Aliyev said of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, due out Nov. 3. The movie is the product of the hysterically fertile mind of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. His character Borat, seen on his HBO series Da Ali G Show, is a Kazakh journalist who presents inhabitants of the ex-Soviet republic as having among their milder habits an addiction to horse urine and a fondness for shooting dogs. To counteract the movie, the Kazakh Foreign Ministry has gone so far as to run ads on CNN and in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune citing facts and figures on the nation's economic growth, civil liberties and cultural achievements. "It's useless to offend an artist and threaten to sue him," Aliyev was quoted as saying in an Associated Press report.

[Last modified October 20, 2006, 08:51:27]