Controversy is swirling around Borat the movie because it makes fun of the villagers in the town where it was filmed. Glod is a poor Roma village in Romania whose name literally means ‘mud’:

When Sacha Baron Cohen wanted a village to represent the impoverished Kazakh home of his character Borat, he found the perfect place in Glod: a remote mountain outpost with no sewerage or running water and where locals eke out meagre livings peddling scrap iron or working patches of land.

But now the villagers of this tiny, close-knit community have angrily accused the comedian of exploiting them, after discovering his new blockbuster film portrays them as a backward group of rapists, abortionists and prostitutes, who happily engage in casual incest. They claim film-makers lied to them about the true nature of the project, which they believed would be a documentary about their hardship… Not a single villager we spoke to had ever been able to afford a trip to the nearest cinema, 20 miles away. [Link]

Part of the Borat schtick is that his sister is a prostitute, and the red light district is the part of his town where women are not hookers. Sadly, similar corridors exist in India. A group of American filmmakers recently released a documentary about widespread prostitution along long-haul Indian trucking routes (via SAJA):

… we spent 9 years making [a documentary] titled Highway Courtesans about a community in India where the eldest daughter of every family is a prostitute by tradition. We followed one young girl on her journey of going into the profession and then ultimately breaking from the tradition.

Here’s the trailer:

The film makes its theatrical premiere at Quad Cinema in NYC from Dec. 1-7.