“Buscando a Dios” series: recognitions abroad, indifference in Chile

A few years ago, the well-known Chilean journalist Jorge Said conceived and developed the television series “Buscando a Dios”, trying to generate audiovisual content that, together with being interesting and attractive, touched on universal aspects and motivations of human life, which challenge all men at all times and anywhere in the world.
Undoubtedly, the nostalgia of transcendence, of a hold on an inscrutable beyond, and on a being that gives foundation and meaning to existence, belong to that sphere of motivations. The intimate, secluded, ever-present yearning of the human creature to bond, connect, reconnect with the Creator, is certainly a motive or an incentive that nests firmly rooted in the heart of all human beings.
Well, this television series, which investigates these trends, investigates them, tries to explain them and records them in an audiovisual key, with an aesthetic and narrative sense, in the most remote places of the world, through the religious manifestations and spirituality with which the different peoples assume their condition as pilgrims and walk hopeful towards the encounter with their divinities, It has been broadcast in these years first through Canal 13 and since 2020 by the international signal History Channel 2, throughout Latin America.
Although in Chile it was never programmed at a time that facilitated the arrival of these contents to the widest segments of the public, but was maintained on Saturdays at dawn, in the most discerning grid of the international signal it has occupied time slots that enhanced its exhibition and made this unique cultural production a real success throughout the continent, even in the immense geographical space of Brazil, for whose audience it was translated neatly.
Thus, Said’s original idea of developing essentially anti-banal television content, alien to vulgarity, has managed to translate into a high-impact series that combines the good entertainment sought by the public, with the delivery of episodes that add knowledge, show experiences and stimulate thought, curiosity, conversation.
That is to say, a television proposal no longer of quality, since this is a pretentious concept, too hackneyed and of meaning difficult to delimit, but simply interesting, entertaining and formative television at the same time, with content that respects audiences and lifts the spirit, and also, by the way, with standards of technical realization compatible with the great world networks. In the field of entertainment and culture, the public can no longer be seen by the seasons as an amorphous and ignorant crowd, responding to almost instinctive stimuli, whose mental development is equivalent to that of a child of ten or twelve years.
One of the remarkable results of this enormous production effort is that the documentary filmmaker and director of the series, Jorge Said, has been recognized this Thursday by the International Honoris Causa Foundation of Mexico, in institutional link with the Santander University, with the granting of the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa in Social Sciences, and this Friday he will be awarded the Ibero-American Medal in the city of Guadalajara, in the framework of a concert organized in his honor called Opera with a Cause.
The Chilean documentary filmmaker will receive this recognition “for his great career as an agent of change and for his knowledge in the field of international journalism and the study of the human being.” He will also be the subject of a series of tributes and forums that will be held in his honor in Mexico City, in the State of Querétaro and in Jalisco, together with the outstanding Japanese artist Etsuro Sotoo, official sculptor of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, architectural summit of the Catalan master Antoni Gaudí.

These achievements have been possible not only because the television series “Buscando a Dios” has managed to capture the interest and excite millions of people in our continent, but also because in other latitudes of our Latin America, in nations that have greater consideration for culture and the elevation of the level of audiences, A job well done is valued and appreciated and there are no complexes to highlight it, recognize it and place it as an example to follow for society.
In our country, on the other hand, television vegetates in a trajectory without clear direction, devoid of social mission, embroiled in the scenario of banality, insignificance and the stubborn promotion of boring figures.conventional. In this sense, what the intrepid and creative Chilean journalist is experiencing in Mexican lands, when receiving the aforementioned recognitions and tributes, is an updated version of the already legendary and well-consolidated “payment of Chile”, that mixture of reticence and pettiness, not devoid of an unconfessed dose of envy, so settled in our Creole mentality, that inhibits us from celebrating our own as they deserve.

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Original source in Spanish