After becoming involved in film in a way that was as impetuous as it was self-critical (see first attempts), Val del Omar was gripped by a passionate concern for education and the dissemination of culture in a country with high levels of illiteracy in rural areas and the urban slums. This led to a very active involvement in the Misiones Pedagógicas of the Spanish Republic and in other progressive initiatives and associations, not to mention the projects that he himself conceived (Foto-fono-cine-teca Nacional, Asociación Creyentes del Cinema).

Val del Omar said that it was García Lorca who put him in touch with Manuel Bartolomé Cossío, the founder of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and the Misiones Pedagógicas that, together with St John of the Cross, were to provide some of his favourite reading matter for the rest of his life.

Between 1931 and 1935, Val del Omar took part in several of the expeditions of the Misiones Pedagógicas, acting above all in areas that reinforced his belief in the new universal culture of the image over that of the fossilized academic realm of letters. This being so, he acted mainly as a photographer, filmmaker and sound and visual resources technician, occasionally as an explicator for the itinerant Museo del Pueblo [People's Museum], and in any other capacity within his capabilities when the need arose.

Some sources, probably reflecting the loquacity of the filmmaker-missionary, put his output for these years at between forty and fifty 16mm documentaries. More recently, doubt has been cast on this implausibly high figure, perhaps because it is at variance with his far from prolific subsequent filmography.

Whatever the case may be, everything suggests that these films were often made on the run, following the itineraries of the successive Missions in which he took part. For example, it has been said that his documentaries on Santiago de Compostela and Granada were shot in a maximum of two days. These documents, quite rightly assigned to the field of ethnographic cinema, in many cases had no other purpose than to depict the geography, the people and the customs of the particular places at which the Missions stopped, often quite isolated villages and hamlets.

But this is all mere conjecture, since what we have today constitutes only a very small part of Val del Omar's filmography of those years, even if we include those documents referred to in one source or another (see stray filmography). At the same time, however, the films that have survived do possess a certain degree of sophistication in terms of editing, inserted captions and sequences of special visual brilliance. [EB]

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