General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

La Tarea

La tarea (English title: Homework) is a 1990 Mexican comedy-drama directed and written by Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, starring María Rojo and José Alonso. Virginia, a film student, hides a running video camera to record the amorous reunion she has arranged with Marcelo, her ex-husband, whom she has not seen for four years, ostensibly to complete an assignment for her film school; Marcelo is tender and seductive with her until he discovers what he is being used for.¹ The film carries the longer alternate title La tarea o De cómo la pornografía salvó del tedio y mejoró la economía de la familia Partida.²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Jaime Humberto Hermosillo¹
Cast	María Rojo as Virginia/María; José Alonso as Marcelo/Pepe³
Production	Clasa Films Mundiales; producers Pablo and Francisco Barbachano, executive producer Lourdes Rivera³
Release	23 August 1991 in Mexico; 8 January 1992 at the Renoir cinema, Madrid⁴^•⁵
Runtime	85 minutes (some listings give 84 minutes)⁵^•⁴
Form	Three long takes, one around 40 minutes, shot with a fixed camera from a single framing⁶
Recognition	Alcatraz de Oro for direction at Cartagena; Special Jury Prize at Moscow; Ariel nomination for Best Actor (José Alonso)⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot and premise

Virginia has attended a film school and, as a graduation exercise, decides to film her encounter with Marcelo, her ex-husband, whom she has not seen in four years. Before the meeting she carefully prepares the staging: the lighting, the position of the cameras, everything arranged to carry the exercise to its last consequences and also to film a possible sexual encounter.⁹ In the film's opening, a woman dressed in black tights and a red skirt conceals a camera under a table in the front room of a middle-class apartment in Mexico; from the couple's conversation it emerges that she lives alone, he is divorced with a six-year-old son, and they had a sexual relationship four years earlier.¹⁰

The premise places the viewer in the position of the hidden camera. An audience review collected by Rotten Tomatoes describes the film as conceived as a single sequence shot with disguised cuts, putting the spectator in a position of total voyeurism from the concealed camera.¹¹

Form and production

The film's formal experiment is its defining feature. The Spanish critic Ángel Fernández-Santos, reviewing the Madrid premiere for El País, noted that La tarea is composed of only three sequence shots, one of them around 40 minutes long, taken with a fixed camera in time simultaneous with the spectator's and from a single framing point; an ordinary film, he observed, usually contains dozens of sequences made up of many hundreds of shots and framing points.⁶ He compared the device to Hitchcock's Rope and concluded that, despite its formal austerity, the film plays with the ease and lightness of conventional entertainment cinema, using the interplay between what is seen on screen and what is inferred to happen off-screen.⁶

A rapid shoot. According to IMDb's trivia, the film was shot in only four days.⁴ A UNAM thesis on low-budget Mexican cinema records the preparation that preceded it: Hermosillo, María Rojo, and José Alonso held talks, script readings, and character analysis, followed by a week of rehearsals on video, so that by the end of that week a video version of La tarea existed, which the two actors studied at home over a weekend before the definitive shoot.⁷

The technical crew included Toni Kuhn as director of photography, Luis Arcaraz composing the original music, Nerio Barberis as sound editor, and Laura Santa Cruz as art director.³ The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Film chapter on the film also credits the songs "Bonita" and "Superstición" by Luis Arcaraz and "Momento" by Los Hermanos Martínez Gil.¹⁰ The film was shot on 35 mm in color.⁵

Release and reception

The film premiered in Mexico on 23 August 1991.⁴ In Spain it opened on 8 January 1992 at the Renoir cinema in Madrid, classified as not recommended for viewers under eighteen; it sold 21,278 tickets there with receipts of 47,886.62.⁵ SensaCine lists the Spanish cinema release as 10 January 1992 and gives the film a user rating of 3.2 from 36 ratings.¹² On Rotten Tomatoes the Tomatometer stands at 44% from two critic reviews; Emanuel Levy gave it 3 out of 5, and Rene Jordan of El Nuevo Herald praised its "extremely ingenious conclusion".¹¹ IMDb lists 4 wins and 3 nominations in total and a user score of 6.3 from 882 votes.⁴

Festival run and awards

During 1991 the film traveled to major international festivals. According to the UNAM thesis, it screened out of competition in the Panorama section of the 41st Berlin International Film Festival in February; won the Alcatraz de Oro for direction at the 31st Cartagena International Film Festival in Colombia in March; took the Bachica de Oro for Best Actress at the International Film Week in Bogotá; received a Special Jury Prize at the 17th Moscow International Film Festival in July; and won the Silver... for Best Director at the 37th Taormina Film Festival in Italy, also in July. It competed as Mexico's entry to be among the five films nominated for the Oscar for best foreign-language film and was nominated for the Ariel for Best Actor.⁷ Hispanopedia records the Ariel de Plata nomination for Best Actor for José Alonso and a Special Mention at the Moscow festival for Hermosillo.⁸ Cine.com lists one 1992 Ariel nomination, for Best Actor.²

The director and the film's place

Jaime Humberto Hermosillo Delgado was born in Aguascalientes in 1942 and died on 13 January 2020 at the age of 77. The Cineteca Nacional describes him as one of the first LGBTTI voices in Mexican cinema, whose films explored facets made invisible by Mexico's conservative morality, and La tarea (dated 1990 in its retrospective listing) among the titles of his peak period, screened in 35 mm prints during a 2020 homage cycle.¹³ A dissertation on Mexican national cinema records that La Tarea became a popular and commercial success in Mexico and marked a significant departure from the traditional industrial model of Mexican film production, given Hermosillo's working context and limited resources.¹⁴ After the film's recognitions, Hermosillo chose not to repeat its formula and filmed Encuentro inesperado in 1991, again for Clasa Films.⁷ The film was followed by La tarea prohibida (1992).⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Erotic thrillers and dramas

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?