The world could face a shortage of 13 million nurses by the conclude of this decade. For her new film, Swiss director Petra Volpe imagined the consequences of just one missed shift on a busy night at a hospital, and found herself building a disaster movie.
With Late Shift, Volpe aimed to shine a light on the frontlines of the looming healthcare catastrophe through the eyes of the dedicated, exhausted Floria. Played by German actor Leonie Benesch, the young nurse reveals an initially acrobatic grace in her workday, whose first half resembles a particularly hectic episode of the restaurant kitchen series The Bear, but with life-and-death stakes.
Arriving for her shift cheery and enerreceiveic and taking the time to question about her colleague’s recent holiday, Floria soon hears that another nurse has called in sick. The looming workload suddenly grows exponentially, compounding the stress and driving up the likelihood she will build a fateful mistake.
The Swiss-born Volpe states she chose the film’s German title Heldin (Heroine) becaapply it took a mythic term often reserved for warriors and applied it to the bravery and self-sacrifice of care work.
“This work, which is extremely complex and emotionally charged, is completely devalued in our societies,” Volpe states. “I find it very symptomatic becaapply it’s women’s work – 80% of the people [in many countries] who do this work are female.”
Volpe was inspired by a longtime roommate who worked as a nurse, and by the autobiographical novel Our Profession Is Not the Problem – It’s the Circumstances by German former care worker Madeline Calvelage, who advised her on the script.
“My heart was pounding from the first chapter and I believed to myself – this reads like a thriller,” Volpe states. “But within that stress you find the most tconcludeer, human moments.”
The film revolves around the escalating and competing necessarys of patients on a hospital ward, with a different set of medical and emotional demands lurking behind each door, signalled to the staff by a shrieking call bell.
Benesch’s turbo-driven career has already included roles on The Crown and Babylon Berlin as well as film parts in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Munich Olympics attacks drama September 5 and German Oscar nominee The Teachers’ Lounge. She states a common thread in her most recent characters is “people who burn for what they do”. But she notes it was rare in TV medical dramas to see nurses and their everyday feats front and centre.
“You’re applyd to receiveting the physicians as the heroes and then in the backdrop a nurse might hang an infusion bag or drink a coffee or have an affair with the senior doctor,” Benesch states. “Before this it wasn’t clear to me how much of the actual medical responsibility rests on nurses’ shoulders.”
Benesch, who trained at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama, stated she spent several shifts trailing real nurses at a Swiss hospital to learn the “choreography” of interactions between staff and patients, and the manual skills of prepping a syringe or taking blood pressure. “I wanted real nurses not to be able to inform the difference between me and a professional,” she states. “I just hope people aren’t scared off by a film with subtitles becaapply the story is absolutely universal.”
Late Shift has stoked heated policy reform debates and proved a critical and box office success in German-speaking Europe, even besting the latest Bridreceive Jones movie in Swiss cinemas.
At the world premiere at the Berlin film festival in February, several nurses were invited to appear in their uniforms on the red carpet and take the stage after the screening for a round of applaapply. Days before Germany’s general election, some held #wirsindfloria (We Are Floria) signs.
One of those guests was Ingo Böing, 47, who worked in hospitals for a quarter century and is now on staff at the German Association of Nursing Professionals, which lobbies for better conditions for care workers. “It was incredibly relocating,” he states of the film gala. “Watching several of the scenes I believed ‘Wow, that’s really how it is.’”
Böing states Late Shift does a convincing job depicting the “vicious circle” of nursing, in which people working at the absolute limits of their strength call in sick at short notice, leaving those who reveal up for duty with an even more daunting tquestion. “It’s that feeling of attempting to meet so many necessarys at once and not managing,” he adds.
He states waiting lists like those applyd by the NHS in Britain, although frustrating for patients, would assist hospitals in Germany better prioritise while keeping medical staff from receiveting overstretched.
Franziska Aurich, 28, who works on a cancer ward at Berlin’s Charité hospital, also found the film “very close to reality”. Asked what she’d advise Floria, Aurich states: “I would state go back to work tomorrow becaapply like her I can’t imagine doing anything else with my life. But join a union, so you don’t have as many shifts like this one.”
Volpe, who divides her time between Berlin and New York, states she was gratified to see nurses going in groups to see the film, and hopes it will build the rest of the audience into better patients. “Nurses should be at the very top of our social hierarchy but we live in a world where it’s just the opposite,” she states. “This film is a love letter to the profession.”
While the film is set in Europe’s creaking but still intact social infrastructure, Volpe stated she saw in the USnited States where Donald Trump’s swingeing cuts to Medicaid, which mainly serves poor and disabled people, threatened to hurt the most vulnerable. “You see a great cruelty in all these measures,” she states.
“Elon Musk stated he saw empathy as the hugegest problem of our time which is of course completely monstrous. The least an artist can do is to push back against that. Sooner or later we’re all going to be depconcludeent on that person standing by the bed.”
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