What Happened to Borat’s Village?

Do you remember the film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan? The village of Glod certainly does. Paid a tiny fee to participate, villagers believed they were taking part in a “report.” Instead, the film portrayed them as the impoverished and violent inhabitants of a fictional Kazakh village, leaving many feeling humiliated and deceived. In this piece, Miles Ellingham returns to Glod twenty years later to meet the people behind the punchline and show readers the real village.

In Glod, people are proud of their heritage, but they’ll also tell you that they’re not like other Roma, by which they mean they work hard. Work is fundamental in Glod; work means money and money means a living. Neamu does whatever he can. In the run-up to Easter, he weaves baskets with his wife, Gica, and whittles spoons with little smiley faces carved into them. His neighbour works in the forest cutting and transporting lumber. In the winter, the temperature drops to -10°C and the work is hard and depressing. Everyone has learned to live with the dogs who wander, semi-domesticated, from house to house. If a visitor is disliked, the dogs will chase them away. We arrive in Glod around 4pm, in the glow of afternoon.