‘My Brother, Borat’: the bizarre sequel that never came to be
Sacha Baron Cohen took everyone by surprise when it was first revealed he’d managed to shoot an entire Borat sequel without being found out, especially when the majority of the footage was captured throughout 2020 when the world began closing its doors.
In September of that year, word began to filter out that the intrepid Kazakh reporter was on his way back to screens, and after a heated bidding war that saw Amazon emerge victorious, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm emerged almost out of nowhere the following month.
However, had Erkin Rakishev gotten his way a decade previously, then he would have been there first. Instead, the frustrated Kazakhstani national was thwarted after his plans to release the unauthorised follow-up, My Brother, Borat, fell apart. Dismayed by the way his country had been portrayed in the 2006 original, he took it upon himself to right those perceived wrongs by making his own gross-out comedy.
Speaking to the BBC, Rakishev outlined his motivations for crafting a bootleg Borat sequel, and while his intentions were admirable, the way he went about it was not. “Every Kazakhstani who goes to the West feels uncomfortable to say where he or she is from,” he said. “This is because people in the West associate the country with Borat’s film.”
The story would adopt a similar mockumentary format and follow the travails of American journalist John, who visits Kazakhstan after seeing the first Borat film. However, when he descends on the Baron Cohen creation’s fictional hometown of Kusek, he’s stunned to discover a modern urban mecca that’s nothing like what he was expecting.
“When Borat made his film, it offended our nation. I think it crossed the line. Maybe they just wanted to joke, but they belittled, insulted and mixed us with dirt. They compared us to animals, showed us as barbarians and wild people,” Rakishev continued. “You say everybody understands that it was a joke. I don’t think so because the majority of people believe in what they see and hear. So when they see this fictional film made by Borat – they believe it’s true.”
Being a movie with ‘Borat’ in the title, there were crude moments, including a man being sexually assaulted by a donkey, not that the filmmaker saw any issues with such scenes. “If it was Borat’s brother who raped the donkey, then perhaps it would be considered outrageous,” he reasoned. “But it is the other way round.”
My Brother, Borat was originally supposed to be released in 2011, but it ended up falling completely off the face of the cinematic map. Although Karishev has never spoken at length as to why, it would be reasonable to expect that there was possibly a team of high-powered Hollywood lawyers involved somewhere along the line.
