Kazakhstan has borrowed Borat’s trademark phrase, “very nice”, in a social media tourism campaign. 

The move comes after years of criticism directed at the Sacha Baron Cohen character from the central Asian country’s officials. 

While authorities had banned the first Borat film in 2006, a series of short promotional films unveiled this week by its tourism board recycled the famous catchphrase.

“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”, released on Amazon last Friday, follows Borat Sagdiyev, a bigoted Kazakh journalist on a mission to win over President Donald Trump’s America. 

But the mockumentary sequel has drawn sharp criticism from the Kazakh American Association, which accused the film of depicting the Muslim-majority country as “misogynistic, incestuous and antisemitism”. 

“As ethnic Kazkahs are an enigma to Americans, we pose an easy target for racism,” the group said in a letter to Amazon executives ahead of its 23 October Amazon release. 

“In this film, a white person adorns a Kazakh persona and then culturally appropriates and belittles everything we stand for,” the letter said. 

In a statement to the New York Times on Monday, Mr Cohen said Kazakhstan was a “beautiful country with a modern, proud society.”

“This is a comedy, and the Kazakhstan in the film has nothing to do with the real country,” he said.

 “I chose Kazakhstan because it was a place that almost nobody in the US knew anything about, which allowed us to create a wild, comedic, fake world. “