"The decision was made to let it die its natural death and not respond,"Sadvakassov said.

Then Keen,the former exchange student,got involved. After his time abroad,he went on to graduate school at Stanford,where he studied with a professor from Kazakhstan. Keen eventually moved to the country,married a local and started a business giving walking tours of Almaty,the country's largest city. He now hosts a travel show on a state television channel. ("I'm kind of like the American Borat,"Keen said.)

When Keen learnt about the sequel,he thought that rather than ignore Cohen,Kazakhstan should embrace the Borat character's catchphrase and turn it into the country's tourism slogan:"Kazakhstan. Very nice!"

It's the kind of idea you get when you own a tourism company and a pandemic has annihilated tourism.

"I've had a lot of free time,"Keen said."Also,I just had a baby. When he grows up,I don't want him to be ashamed of Borat. I want him to say,'That's when my dad started this whole fun project.'"

Two weeks ago,Keen and a friend,Yermek Utemissov,who helps foreign film companies arrange shoots in Kazakhstan,pitched an idea to the board of tourism. They got an immediate'yes'. The two worked pro bono to make four slickly produced,internet-friendly 12-second spots featuring people walking around Kazakhstan and observing that it's"very nice". In one,a man at a market drinks traditional fermented horse milk (not horse urine) and says:"That's actually very nice".

The new movie,Borat Subsequent Moviefilm:Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,"doesn't let up on stereotyping the nation. It starts with Borat doing hard labour in prison,explaining the fictional consequences of the original film in a voice-over:"Kazakhstan become laughing stocks around the world. Our exports of potassium and pubis plummet. Many brokers leapt from our tallest skyscrapers. Since Running of Jew had been cancelled,all Kazakhstan had left was Holocaust Remembrance Day,where we commemorate our heroic soldiers who ran the camps."

But Utemissov said he wasn't worried that his fellow citizens would get mad this time.

"It's a newer generation,"he said."They've got Twitter,they've got Instagram,they've got Reddit,they know English,they know memes. They get it. They're inside the media world. We're looking at the same comedians,the same Kimmel show. Kazakhstan is globalised."

Sadvakassov,the deputy chairman of the tourism board,hadn't seen the movie before its premiere,but he said he wasn't concerned,either.

"In COVID times,when tourism spending is on hold,it was good to see the country mentioned in the media,"he said."Not in the nicest way,but it's good to be out there. We would love to work with Cohen,or maybe even have him film here."

When Cohen learnt that Kazakhstan had reversed itself and embraced his franchise,he offered a statement by email.

"This is a comedy,and the Kazakhstan in the film has nothing to do with the real country,"he wrote."I chose Kazakhstan because it was a place that almost nobody in the US knew anything about,which allowed us to create a wild,comedic,fake world. The real Kazakhstan is a beautiful country with a modern,proud society — the opposite of Borat's version."

That's as close as Borat gets to being very nice.

The New York Times