From the 1960s and until his death in 1982, Val del Omar's activity suffered a series of setbacks, mostly due to the lack of success of his proposals for new formats and technical improvements in film and television production and other more daring – not to say extravagant – ideas and inventions. His wife's blindness and subsequent death also affected his mood.

Although in his last years he was surrounded by young people, and in particular a chorus of female admirers whom he affectionately referred to as his ''guras'' (guru girls), in whose company he recaptured some of his former happiness and love of life, there were also times when he felt demoralised and was sunk in melancholy, as some of his diary entries show.

For all of these reasons, Val del Omar's filmmaking activity in the last years of his life apparently consists of a miscellany of unfinished material that he reworked time and again, even if only mentally.

This miscellany ranges from a ''commissioned'' work such as the series Festivales de España – although this was a commission he actively sought and tried to handle in his own terms, in part at least – to the relative heterogeneity of his Super-8 footage, by way of the unity of the numerous reels he shot on his periodic returns to his beloved Granada, many of them in the Bi-Standard format he himself invented.

All of these materials are of interest in their own right, even in their rough state – at best thrown together, or barely sketching out the final edit they never received; at the same time they provided the basis for the creation of the film Throw Your Watch to the Water. [EB]

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