CINEMA AS BRANDING - Tourism in Central Asia: Cultural Potential and Challenges - page 177

not to his country's human rights record), which formally ended the affair.
This neat comment, however, was nothing more than an empty diplomatic
gesture because people learned from Borat about Sacha Cohen and not
about Kazakhstan that came to be known as the comedian's invention.
Caught in crossfire with Borat , an international distributor of Nomad did
not release the film in March 2007, as was announced earlier. It arrived in
Blockbuster stores months later, creating no splash in public conscious-
ness whatsoever. 6
On Kazakhstan's side, people with vested interests in Nomad blamed
poor timing for the failure of their country's project. But this opinion ig-
nored the fact that Nomad was unsuccessful on two fronts, international
and domestic, suggesting that other factors were also at work. The film
was highly anticipated in Kazakhstan but once it was released it gener-
ated no spontaneous public response; it simply became a nonevent. 7 My
personal snapshot of reaction to the film by the Almaty public is revealing:
after watching Nomad , my local companions told me that I was trying to
read the film too deeply looking for some meaning that does not exist.
“This film wasn't made for us,” they said, explaining their disinterest in
discussing the film: “they just wanted to create a Hollywood-like picture,
that's all.”
Film is an important cultural medium in the process of “negotiating
between the local and the global.” It is also important “for reconstructing
society and public spheres after social traumas of civil war, revolution,
state collapse, earthquake, and other massive social disruptions” (Fischer,
2003). In other words, the magic of film is that it works across cultural
boundaries, simultaneously contributing to the national loyalty and devel-
opment, something that a young nation-state as Kazakhstan, not short of
social disruptions in its history, might consider useful. What the aforemen-
tioned comments by the Almaty movie-goers indicate is that Nomad has
had no such appeal to the national audience, admitting it as unauthentic
and fraudulent.
6 It is hard to say why exactly the international distributor of Nomad chose not to screen the film in
movie theatres on the wave of the Borat buzz that, at least in theory, could actually help promoting it.
7 Several formal reviews came out in Kazakhstan in which the authors praised the film in attempt to
valorize the state and its leadership (Sergey Kudryavtsev 'Kogda hochet'sya byt' kazahom' Baiterek ,
3/18, June 2006: 10-13).