Borat
2006 mockumentary comedy film directed by Larry Charles

Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (known commonly as Borat) is a 2006 mockumentary black comedy film co-written by and starring Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat Sagdiyev, a fictional Kazakh journalist traveling through the United States. Much of the film features unscripted vignettes of Borat interviewing and interacting with real-life Americans who believe he is a foreigner with little or no understanding of the local customs. Borat is the second of five films built around Baron Cohen's characters from Da Ali G Show and Ali G Indahouse.
Borat was released on 2 November 2006 by 20th Century Fox. The film received critical acclaim and made $262 million worldwide. Baron Cohen won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, while the film was nominated for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. Borat also received Academy Award and WGA Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay. Controversy surrounded the film prior to its release, and after the film's release, some participants spoke against, and even sued, its creators. It was denounced by the Kazakh government and was banned in almost all Arab countries except for Lebanon, though it later was embraced by the Kazakh government in tourism campaigns.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Borat” as 2006 mockumentary comedy film directed by Larry Charles. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2006 mockumentary comedy film directed by Larry Charles. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q186323. VIAF identifies the subject as 229018536. The Library of Congress control number is no2007027072. 4 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 3 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Borat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.