“Buscando a Dios” series: recognition 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, along with being interesting and attractive, touched on universal aspects and motivations of human life, which challenge all men. at any time and anywhere in the world.

Undoubtedly the nostalgia for transcendence, for a hold on an inscrutable beyond, and on a being that gives foundation and meaning to existence, belongs to that sphere of motivations. The intimate, secluded, always current desire of the human creature to be linked, connected, reconnected with the Creator, is certainly a motive or an incentive that is firmly rooted in the hearts of all human beings.

Well, this television series, which investigates these tendencies, investigates them, tries to explain them and records them in an audiovisual key, with an aesthetic and narrative sense, in the most remote places in the world, through religious and spiritual manifestations with that the different peoples assume their status as pilgrims and walk with hope towards the encounter with their divinities, has been broadcast in these years first through Channel 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 would facilitate the arrival of this content to the broadest segments of the public, but rather it was maintained on Saturday mornings, in the most judicious grid of the international signal it has occupied time slots that boosted its exhibition and made this singular cultural production a true success throughout the continent, including in the immense geographical space of Brazil, for whose audience it was extensively translated.

Thus, Said’s original idea of ​​developing essentially anti-banal television content, far from vulgarity, has managed to translate into a high-impact series that combines the good entertainment that the public is looking for, with the delivery of episodes that add knowledge, show experiences and stimulate thought, curiosity, conversation.

In other words, a television proposal that is no longer of quality, since this is a pretentious concept, too hackneyed and with a meaning that is difficult to delimit, but simply interesting, entertaining and educational television at the same time, with content that respects the audience and lifts the spirit. , and also, by the way, with technical production standards compatible with the big world chains. In the field of entertainment and culture, the public can no longer be seen by the stations as an amorphous and ignorant crowd, responding to almost instinctive stimuli, whose mental development is equivalent to that of a ten or twelve year old child.

One of the notable 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 Fundación Honoris Causa Internacional de México, in institutional ties with the Santander University, with the award of the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa in Social Sciences, and this Friday the Ibero-American Medal will be awarded to him in the city of Guadalajara, within the framework of a concert organized in his honor called Ópera con Causa.

The Chilean documentalist 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 prominent Japanese artist Etsuro Sotoo, official sculptor of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, ​​summit architecture 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 the culture and raising 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 a clear direction, devoid of a social mission, entrenched in the scenario of banality, inconsequentiality, and the stubborn promotion of boringly conventional figures. In this sense, what the intrepid and creative Chilean journalist is living in Mexican lands, upon receiving the aforementioned recognitions and tributes, is an updated version of the already legendary and well-established “Pago de Chile”, that mixture of reluctance and pettiness, not devoid of an unavowed dose of envy, so settled in our Creole mentality, that it inhibits us from celebrating our loved ones as they deserve.