Seventeen-year-old Carmen Ciorebea may be a listless teenager, but she is resolute about one thing. 'Glod is a terrible, terrible village. Nothing ever happens and there is nothing beautiful to see here,' she sighs. 'I will never be happy here.'
She is not alone in these sentiments, which are shared by many in the poverty-stricken Romanian village, nestled in the shadow of the Carpathian mountains north-west of Bucharest. Life is hard here: toilets are little more than sheltered holes in the ground, and horses and donkeys are the only source of transport. Most people eke out a living peddling scrap iron or working scrubby patches of land.
So when a Hollywood film crew descended on Glod three years ago to make a 'documentary' about their lives, many of the 1,000 residents were only too happy to take the £3 that was offered to anyone who participated.
If the tall, lanky and moustached presenter seemed a little odd, who were they to question the ways of the world of television? They said nothing when this rather manic Borat character installed a cow in one of their homes, or was filmed being transported in a car, which, although perfectly serviceable, should, he insisted, be pulled along by a horse.
But then the villagers of Glod were not to know that Borat, aka the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, was not making a documentary but a comedy film, with some of the laughs very much at their expense.