Three years on - Borat still censored in Kazakhstan

MOSCOW - More than three years after its first release, “Borat” - the fictional film about a Kazakh TV journalist created by British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen - is still being censored in the central Asian republic, it was reported Sunday.

The movie, which depicted Kazakhstan as backward, inbred and anti-semitic, caused huge controversy on its original release, in 2006.

It even led to Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev officially complaining to then British prime minister Tony Blair.

Now, three years and one sequel later (albeit this time Baron Cohen played an equally offensive gay Austrian fashion reporter), the film still causes ructions in Kazakhstan.

A showing of the film by Russian TV Saturday night was blocked from viewing by the authorities in Astana, with a either no signal or replacement music videos being broadcast, Interfax news agency in Moscow said.

The film is not officially available in Kazakhstan, and pirated copies of Borat can be bought at street markets, or illegally downloaded from the internet.

A spokesman for the Foreign Affairs ministry in Astana said his country had nothing against the film being broadcast in Russia, because it “dealt with the conditions in the US, not Kazakhstan.”

Tourism Minister Temirkhan Dozmukhanbetov even suggested recently to foreign journalists that the movie had been “really good advertising” for his country.