Romania in the news
There's a news story going around about American frat boys suing 20th Century Fox because there's footage of them making obnoxious misogynist comments in the movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I'm not terribly sympathetic; you don't need to be an elected official to know that you're responsible for everything you say while drunk or sober, and doubly responsible when you're looking down the barrel of a TV camera.
However, I got a peculiar feeling in my stomach when I saw newspaper photos of the "Kazakh" town portrayed in the movie. The architecture and pastel stucco walls made me think immediately of several Romanian villages I've visited.
Sure enough, it turns out that the Kazakh sequences in the movie were filmed in the southern Romanian village of Glod. The locals are not amused that the production company portrayed them as prostitutes and practitioners of incest, and let animals defecate in their houses.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, we shouldn't assume from the outset that just because these people are impoverished they didn't know what they were agreeing to do. In my experience, lack of sanitation and mechanized agriculture doesn't stop Romanian peasants from being worldly folks who are pretty savvy about making money. How well did the production crew explain the premise of the movie to everyone in the village? Did people know how they would be portrayed?
On the other hand, conditions are pretty rough for Romanian peasants these days. Could a town facing severe economic problems really turn down an exploitive production company? The story sent me nosing about the Internet to see how my favourite Romanian village, Lunca Ilvei, is doing. It looks like they have some challenges ahead. A different newspaper has a more positive spin. Apparently my old host Julian has hit on a new tourist niche market: journalists.
However, I got a peculiar feeling in my stomach when I saw newspaper photos of the "Kazakh" town portrayed in the movie. The architecture and pastel stucco walls made me think immediately of several Romanian villages I've visited.
Sure enough, it turns out that the Kazakh sequences in the movie were filmed in the southern Romanian village of Glod. The locals are not amused that the production company portrayed them as prostitutes and practitioners of incest, and let animals defecate in their houses.
I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, we shouldn't assume from the outset that just because these people are impoverished they didn't know what they were agreeing to do. In my experience, lack of sanitation and mechanized agriculture doesn't stop Romanian peasants from being worldly folks who are pretty savvy about making money. How well did the production crew explain the premise of the movie to everyone in the village? Did people know how they would be portrayed?
On the other hand, conditions are pretty rough for Romanian peasants these days. Could a town facing severe economic problems really turn down an exploitive production company? The story sent me nosing about the Internet to see how my favourite Romanian village, Lunca Ilvei, is doing. It looks like they have some challenges ahead. A different newspaper has a more positive spin. Apparently my old host Julian has hit on a new tourist niche market: journalists.