Carmen Meets Borat

Australasian Premiere

Director Mercedes Stalenhoef follows the life of a 17 year old Carmen living in Glod, a small Romanian gypsy village where the men spend their days exchanging coarse words in her father’s bar. In the evenings, Carmen watches Spanish soap opera and dreams of immigrating to a better life overseas.

When Hollywood came to their village to film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, the community had no idea what they were being filmed for and jovially cooperated with the film crew’s demands. The villagers don’t understand a single word of English and laugh in good faith into the camera. Later, they discovered that they were truly exploited as primitive caricatures supposedly from Kazakhstan. Carmen’s grandfather plays the part of an abortion expert and poses for the camera with a welding apparatus. Borat embraces a woman he introduces as his sister and brags about her status as the fourth best whore in Kazakhstan.

Upon the film’s release, the world press descended on the village causing friction and suspicion among the villagers. They felt abused and discriminated and wanted to get back at Borat’s makers. When an American lawyer offered out the prospect of a $30 million insurance claim to the villagers, the village descends into chaos as the residents once again find themselves ridiculed and taken advantage of.