Kazakhstan Invades Hollywood, Nomads Battle Borat

Smart guy Sacha Baron Cohen and his outrageous comedy Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is the big boxoffice moneymaker of this year's comedies. Sacha Baron Cohen is not a native of Kazakhstan, but his mysterious origin in another small nation, England, makes us wonder why he didn't create an imaginary nation and culture to parody instead of using the highly educated and literate culture of Kazakhstan as the vehicle to comment on the pecularities of American popular culture.

Certainly, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is a funny movie and it does make a lot of satirical observations about American society that prove that Sacha Baron Cohen is a social scientist at heart, a mad social scientist.

Mythical cultures have been created by Hollywoods scriptwriters to deliver ideological messages and create subliminal ideational responses in audiences. Producer-Filmmaker-Director Mel Gibson uses the Mayan culture of his imagination to deliver the subliminal message in his action-adventure film, Apocalypto triggering an emotional reaction in the audience. The method he uses is constantly being refined and perfected to enable him to distribute his message to a mass audience.
Sacha Baron Cohen would have us think that Kazakhstan is a backward-looking nation of peoples from the arid Central Asia steppes as projected by his misrepresentation of that country's cultural practices. Actually, Kazakhstan has a literacy rate of 98.8%, that is higher than in some "developed, western nations." It is the 9th largest in land area, and 62nd in population, a favorable ratio that means the country's leading economic sector, oil and gas, has plentiful reserves that can be exported to Western Europe for Euros that will be invested in Kazakhstan's emerging technological industries that are being nutured by the government.

Kazakhstan is seeking participation in the innovation economy and this will be made possible by the government's willingness to support initiatives for economic development and has the foreign exchange inflows to make it possible.
Another developed economic sector is Agriculture. Wheat, for those of us who take our morning doughnut for granted, is the grain the flour is made from that powers-up our first clicks of the day, and along with barley, cotton and rice make up 14% of the country's Gross National Product.

Kazakhstan is energy and food independent, not many western nations can claim that, Mister Smart Guy, Sacha Baron Cohen.

Kazakhstan launched KazSat 1 on June 18, 2006- it's first commercial communications satellite. It will soon be able to transmit the signal that carries the first feature-length film about Kazakhstan, Nomad the historical epic written by Rustam Ibragimbekov, directed by Ivan Passer, Sergi Bodrov and Talgat Tehenov.

Nomad is being executive produced by Milos Forman and distributed by the brothers Bob and Harvey of the Weinstein Company, who realized that the story of a young boy who is destined to unite the warring factions of Kazakhstan and free them from the domination of the invading Jungers is one that could be told across national borders, overcoming cultural barriers and infiltrate the media motherland of the infamous Mister Smart Guy, Sacha Baron Cohen.

The hero must have a heroine and Ayana Yesmagambetova is the beautiful Gaukar, triangled by the young man Mansur, played by Kuno Becker, a Mexican actor and Erali (Jay Hernandez- an American.) Except for the "cast of thousands of extras" most of the cast is American.

This film, shot under the big sky on the vast expanse of the Russian steppes has excellent visuals, the production design spared no expense, Nomad cost the Kazakhstan government $40 million to film.

It might be said that this film has an ideological message, as it tells the story of the formation of what was to become the present nation, but what film that deals with human conflicts doesn't?