The world could face a shortage of 13 million nurses by the end 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 making 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 shows 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 energetic and taking the time to ask 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 make a fateful mistake.
The Swiss-born Volpe says she chose the film’s German title Heldin (Heroine) because 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 says. “I find it very symptomatic because 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 thought to myself – this reads like a thriller,” Volpe says. “But within that stress you find the most tender, human moments.”
The film revolves around the escalating and competing needs 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 says 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 used to getting 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 says. “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, said 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 tell the difference between me and a professional,” she says. “I just hope people aren’t scared off by a film with subtitles because 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 Bridget 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 applause. 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 moving,” he says of the film gala. “Watching several of the scenes I thought ‘Wow, that’s really how it is.’”
Böing says 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 show up for duty with an even more daunting task. “It’s that feeling of trying to meet so many needs at once and not managing,” he adds.
He says waiting lists like those used by the NHS in Britain, although frustrating for patients, would help hospitals in Germany better prioritise while keeping medical staff from getting 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 says: “I would say go back to work tomorrow because 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, says she was gratified to see nurses going in groups to see the film, and hopes it will make 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 says. “This film is a love letter to the profession.”
While the film is set in Europe’s creaking but still intact social infrastructure, Volpe said 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 says.
“Elon Musk said he saw empathy as the biggest 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 dependent on that person standing by the bed.”