Romanians Angry With Borat

If you've read my previous post, you may have clicked the link to the Borat video. Funny stuff. Well, apparently some Romanians don't think it's so funny. Below is an article from The Mail, a British newspaper:

Borat film 'tricked' poor village actors
By BOJAN PANCEVSKI and CARMIOLA IONESCU, Mail on Sunday

Last updated at 21:25pm on 11th November 2006

When Sacha Baron Cohen wanted a village to represent the impoverished
Kazakh home of his character Borat, he found the perfect place in
Glod: a remote mountain outpost with no sewerage or running water and
where locals eke out meagre livings peddling scrap iron or working
patches of land.

But now the villagers of this tiny, close-knit community have angrily
accused the comedian of exploiting them, after discovering his new
blockbuster film portrays them as a backward group of rapists,
abortionists and prostitutes, who happily engage in casual incest.

They claim film-makers lied to them about the true nature of the
project, which they believed would be a documentary about their
hardship, rather than a comedy mocking their poverty and isolation.

Villagers say they were paid just £3 each for this humiliation, for a
film that took around £27million at the worldwide box office in its
first week of release.

Now they are planning to scrape together whatever modest sums they
can muster to sue Baron Cohen and fellow film-makers, claiming they
never gave their consent to be so cruelly misrepresented.

Disabled Nicu Tudorache said: This is disgusting. They conned us into
doing all these things and never told us anything about what was
going on. They made us look like primitives, like uncivilised
savages. Now they,re making millions but have only paid us 15 lei
[around £3].

Cambridge-educated Baron Cohen filmed the opening scenes of the Borat
movie in Glod - a village that is actually in Romania, rather than
Kazakhstan, and whose name literally translates as 'mud', last
summer.

Its 1,000 residents live in dilapidated huts in the shadow of the
Carpathian mountains. Toilets are little more than sheltered holes in
the ground and horses and donkeys are the only source of transport.

Just four villagers have permanent employment in the nearby towns of
Pucioasa or Fieni, while the rest live off what little welfare
benefits they get.

So when a Hollywood film crew descended on a nearby run-down motel
last September, with their flashy cars and expensive equipment,
locals thought their lowly community might finally be getting some of
the investment it so desperately needs.

The crew was led by a man villagers describe as 'nice and friendly,
if a bit weird and ugly', who they later learned was Baron Cohen. It
is thought the producers chose the region because locals more closely
resembled his comic creation than genuine Kazakhs.

The comedian insisted on travelling everywhere with bulky bodyguards,
because, as one local said: 'He seemed to think there were crooks
among us.'

While the rest of the crew based themselves in the motel, Baron Cohen
stayed in a hotel in Sinaia, a nearby ski resort a world away from
Glod's grinding poverty. He would come to the village every morning
to do 'weird things', such as bringing animals inside the run-down
homes, or have the village children filmed holding weapons.

Mr Tudorache, a deeply religious grandfather who lost his arm in an
accident, was one of those who feels most humiliated. For one scene,
a rubber sex toy in the shape of a fist was attached to the stump of
his missing arm - but he had no idea what it was.

Only when The Mail on Sunday visited him did he find out. He said he
was ashamed, confessing that he only agreed to be filmed because he
hoped to top up his £70-a-month salary - although in the end he was
paid just £3.

He invited us into his humble home and brought out the best food and
drink his family had. Visibly disturbed, he said shakily: 'Someone
from the council said these Americans need a man with no arm for some
scenes. I said yes but I never imagined the whole country, or even
the whole world, will see me in the cinemas ridiculed in this way.
This is disgusting.

'Our region is very poor, and everyone is trying hard to get out of
this misery. It is outrageous to exploit people's misfortune like
this to laugh at them.

'We are now coming together and will try to hire a lawyer and take
legal action for being cheated and exploited. We are simple folk and
don't know anything about these things, but I have faith in God and
justice.'

If the village does sue the film-makers, they won't be the first.
Last week, two unnamed college students who were caught on film
drunkenly making racist and sexist comments took legal action,
claiming the production team plied them with alcohol and falsely
promised that the footage would never be seen in America.

Many other unwitting victims of Baron Cohen's pranks have also spoken
out against the way they were conned and - unsurprisingly - the
rulers of Kazakhstan have long taken issue with the image Borat
paints of their vast, oil-rich nation.

The residents of Glod only found out about the true nature of the
film after seeing a Romanian TV report. Some thought it was an art
project, others a documentary.

The Mail on Sunday showed them the cinema trailer - the first footage
they had seen from the film. Many were on the brink of tears as they
saw how they were portrayed.

Claudia Luca, who lives with her extended family in the house next to
the one that served as Borat's home, said: 'We now realise they only
came here because we are poorer than anyone else in this village.
They never told us what they were doing but took advantage of our
misfortune and poverty. They made us look like savages, why would
anyone do that?'

Her brother-in law Gheorghe Luca owns the house that stood in for
Borat's - which the film-makers adorned by bringing a live cow into
his living room.

Luca, who now refers to Baron Cohen as to the 'ugly, tall,
moustachioed American man', even though the 35-year-old comedian is
British, said: 'They paid my family £30 for four full days. They were
nice and friendly, but we could not understand a single word they
were saying.

'It was very uncomfortable at the end and there was animal manure all
over our home. We endured it because we are poor and badly needed the
money, but now we realise we were cheated and taken advantage of in
the worst way.

'All those things they said about us in the film are terribly
humiliating. They said we drink horse urine and sleep with our own
kin. You say it's comedy, but how can someone laugh at that?'

Spirea Ciorobea, who played the 'village mechanic and abortionist' ,
said: 'What I saw looks disgusting. Even if we are uneducated and
poor, it is not fair that someone does this to us.'

He remembered wondering why the crew took an old, broken Dacia car
and turned it into a horse cart. He said: 'We all thought they were a
bit crazy, but now its seems they wanted to show that it is us who
drive around in carts like that.'

Local councillor Nicolae Staicu helped the crew with their shooting,
but he claims he was never told what sort of movie they were making,
and that they failed to get a proper permit for filming.

Staicu, who had never dealt with a film crew before, said: 'I was
happy they came and I thought it would be useful for our country, but
they never bothered to ask for a permit, let alone pay the official
fees.

'I realise I should have taken some legal steps but I was simply
naive enough to believe that they actually wanted to do something
good for the community here.

'They came with bodyguards and expensive cars and just went on with
their job, so we assumed someone official in the capital Bucharest
had let them film.'

Bogdan Moncea of Castel Film, the Bucharest-based production company
that helped the filming in Romania, said the crew donated computers
and TV sets to the local school and the villagers. But the locals
have denied this.

Mr Staicu said: 'The school got some notebooks, but that was it.
People are angry now, they feel cheated.'

It's a feeling Glod is used to. The village, like others in the
Dambovita region of Romania, is populated mainly by gipsies who say
they are discriminated against by the rest of the country.

Indeed, when local vice-mayor Petre Buzea was asked whether the
people felt offended by Baron Cohen's film, he replied: 'They got
paid so I am sure they are happy. These gipsies will even kill their
own father for money.'

No one from the 20th Century Fox studio was available for comment on
the villagers' claims.

But feelings in Glod are running so high that The Mail on Sunday saw
angry villagers brandishing farm implements chase out a local TV
crew, shouting that they had enough of being exploited.

It is small comfort that few, if any, of them will get to see the
Borat film. Not a single villager we spoke to had ever been able to
afford a trip to the nearest cinema, 20 miles away.

Perhaps that's the real reason why film-makers chose Glod in the
first place.