Enraged at their treatment at the hands of Borat, the people of Kazakhstan have turned to Genghis Khan to rescue them from humiliation on the silver screen. So will a lavish biopic of the Mongolian emperor restore national pride, asks Dan McLaughlin
It could hardly be described as a fair cinematic fight. In one corner, we have a lanky "Kazakh" television presenter in a cheap suit, whose bushy moustache is unable to hide a distinct lack of stiffness in his upper lip. In the other, we have a legendary warrior dubbed "the scourge of God" and "the mighty man-slayer", the founder of the largest connected land empire the world has ever seen.
Borat and Genghis Khan make a peculiar pair, but they are currently being cast as the contrasting faces of celluloid central Asia - the former as the star of an infamous "mockumentary" that enraged Kazakhstan's leaders, the latter as the subject of a Kazakh movie that is being hailed as proof that the region can make spectacular, big-budget cinema.
Mongol, which opens in Dublin today, tells the tale of a boy named Temujin, who sees his chieftain father murdered, survives exile and slavery, wins the heart of a girl who becomes his first wife, and forges an alliance of Mongol tribes, who give him the honorary title Genghis Khan. Far from being a bloodthirsty killer, the young Genghis is portrayed as a loving husband and father who unleashes his fighting spirit more from necessity than choice.
This film deals only with Genghis's early life. At least one sequel is planned, and it's likely to become a trilogy. Subsequent movies will tell how Genghis forged an empire stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Caspian Sea - some four times larger than the dominions of ancient Rome or Alexander the Great.
Mongol's Russian director, Sergei Bodrov, calls his film "the story of a family man who wanted to live in peace and quiet, but who was not allowed to, and then rose to protect his family and his people . . . I'm fascinated by this story of an ordinary boy from a poor family who became a great leader."
Russian media have called his film - which was nominated for the best foreign film award at this year's Oscars - a Eurasian answer to Hollywood's 2004 movie Alexander, which starred Colin Farrell as the eponymous Macedonian leader.
While there is some western European involvement in the movie, Mongolis mostly funded by Kazakhs and shot by a Russian director on location in the remote steppes of Kazakhstan and China, with a script in Mongolian and a Japanese actor playing Genghis.
"It was extremely difficult logistically, with a limited budget that ended up around $20 million," Bodrov told one interviewer. "I was working with a 600-person crew speaking 11 languages, with 40 translators, 1,000 extras and 1,000 horses." The film is of a scale that is almost unheard of in Kazakhstan, and the epic battle scenes are as gorily impressive as the vast, open landscapes are bleakly beautiful.
"We are really proud of our film and our country," said Gulnara Sarsenova, the flamboyant cosmetics magnate who co-produced and helped fund the movie. "It was a joint project but we also put a lot of effort into it, a lot of soul, a lot of time."
In 2006, Kazakhstan became the butt of many of the jokes in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Borat, the creation of British comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen, became something of a hate figure in Kazakhstan for suggesting that it was a place in which, among other things, Jew-baiting was a national sport, wine was made from horse urine, and women were used to pull ploughs.
Kazakhs hope Mongolwill cast their country in a different light and remind the world about the historical might of central Asia. The sponsors of the film, and the politicians who facilitated it, also hope that it will strengthen national identity at home and broaden the international image of a country currently most closely associated with oil, gas and a fictional homophobic, misogynist, anti-Semitic journalist.
"This nomination is a message to Kazakhstan's business and government: 'Guys, you can export not just oil, gas and grain but also highly creative products'," another financier and co-producer of Mongol, Bolat Galimgereyev, said when the film reached the Oscar short-list.
Kazakhstan is a country of extraordinary extremes: it is the size of western Europe but home to only 15 million people, about 47 per cent of them ethnic Kazakh and 44 per cent Russian; in some areas, fields of waving corn stretch as far as the eye can see, while others are poisoned by Soviet nuclear tests and sprawling industrial and chemical combines; oil and gas wealth has created a coterie of ostentatious oligarchs, but the average monthly wage is only some €225; and it is a country crucial to regional stability, while still struggling to find its own identity.
Kazakh culture, suppressed first by tsarist Russian settlers and then the Soviet authorities, is only now re-asserting itself under the patronage of Nazarbayev, an autocrat who tolerates little dissent but is rarely criticised by western powers, who covet his mineral wealth and fear his becoming too close to neighbouring Russia or China.
Seventeen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union gave Kazakhstan its independence, the country's drive to forge a national identity and tap into an ancient heritage has found a lodestar in Genghis Kahn - even if he wasn't Kazakh, but from a closely related Mongolian tribe with a similar nomadic history.
Mongol's spectacular battle scenes, sweeping landscapes and lavish costumes certainly stirred the blood of Kazakh audiences, who now eagerly await the second part of the planned Genghis Khan trilogy.
If completed, that cinematic journey would take Genghis to the edge of Europe, and perhaps even go some way towards dislodging Borat as the unwanted icon of Kazakh film. It would be a posthumous victory for which millions of Kazakhs would heartily thank the mighty man-slayer.
