Latest news with #PetraVolpe
The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The shocking hit film about overworked nurses that's causing alarm across Europe
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 US 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.' Late Shift will be released in the UK and Ireland on 1 August
Irish Times
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Late Shift review: A nursing meltdown opens us up to unseen and underappreciated lives
Late Shift Director : Petra Volpe Cert : 12A Starring : Leonie Benesch, Sonja Riesen, Urs Bihler, Margherita Schoch, Jürg Plüss, Urbain Guiguemdé Running Time : 1 hr 31 mins One can imagine screening this wrenching Swiss film in a double bill with Laura Carreira's recent On Falling . Two studies of a woman at work. Two protagonists at the end of their tether. Two indictments of contemporary malaise. Yet the jobs and the pressures within them could hardly be more different. In Carreira's film, a low-paid warehouse worker trundles down aisles gathering the useless items purchased by online shoppers. In Late Shift, Leonie Benesch plays Floria, a surgical nurse doing vital midnight duty in a hospital strained by understaffing. 'It's just two of us today,' she says repeatedly to aggrieved patients. [ On Falling review: This superb debut about a lonely warehouse picker is an astonishing fable of hidden miseries Opens in new window ] Night Shift and On Falling both profit from rigorous research into the respective workplaces. Benesch, so good in last year's The Teachers' Lounge , prepared with an internship in a Swiss hospital, and only a professional would question the confidence she brings to injections, dressings and the mopping up of unpleasant bodily fluids. The hospital interior gleams like something from impossible science fiction. The endless high-tech equipment looks to have been pulled straight from its packaging. All this feels like a rebuke to the staff who, even if so diligent as Floria, find tempers fraying at endless unsolvable problems. Our protagonist can't get a doctor to deliver bad news to a fretful older patient. She must bark at a patient smoking next to her oxygen tank. All this to a wavering score – sometimes ambient, sometimes ratcheting – from Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch. READ MORE Night Shift does not go for full-on social realism. One wealthy patient comes across as something of a cliche. The details of Floria's eventual meltdown would be more at home in a medical soap than in a film that, elsewhere, strives for rigorous representation of working practices. But Benesch carries us compellingly through those narrative convulsions to an ending that makes an epic of the everyday. As was the case with On Falling, the film opens us up to unseen and underappreciated lives. [ Late Shift star Leonie Benesch: 'The biggest shock was realising how broken health systems are globally' Opens in new window ] A closing note on the nursing crisis in Switzerland points out an unspoken subtext. That country has one of the most advanced healthcare services in Europe. More than a few hospital professionals from other nations may look at Floria's situation with some envy. Late Shift is in cinemas from Friday, August 1st
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Late Shift review – pressure is on in badly understaffed hospital as compassion shines through
Considering her film The Teachers' Lounge gained a best international feature film Oscar nomination, maybe Leonie Benesch should be better known. (As well as playing a teacher in that film, she was also the interpreter in the Munich Olympics drama-thriller September 5 and played Prince Philip's sister Cecilie in Netflix's The Crown.) Benesch could be cornering the market in tough, competent, hardworking young women doing their best in a stressful situation. Here she plays Floria, a nurse (and a single mum) working the late shift in a gleamingly modern but evidently badly understaffed Swiss hospital. Floria has to hit the ground running from the very beginning of every working day. (The original German title is Heldin, or Heroine.) Writer-director Petra Volpe has adapted the autobiographical novel Our Profession Is Not the Problem. It's the Circumstances, by German nurse turned author Madeline Calvelage. It's shot using classically Aaron Sorkin walk-and-talk lines, with Floria exchanging terse technical dialogue with colleagues in the corridors. And there's almost a real-time single-take aesthetic, although there are conventional edits. British audiences would be within their rights to compare it to Casualty or Holby City. Floria is compassionate and conscientious, but it is clear that the workload is almost intolerable. Over the closing credits, the film invokes World Health Organization findings that there is a global lack of nurses. Every conversation or encounter with a patient is pressured, and patients are either poignantly grateful or resentfully on the verge of complaining. To calm one old woman with dementia, Floria sings the German lullaby The Moon Has Risen, and the woman quaveringly joins in. It's a touching moment, which briefly stills the movie's frantic pace, but it makes Floria late for everything and everyone else. The crisis arises with a pompous man who has paid for a private room and is furious because Floria is late bringing him his tea. Floria snaps, but the situation is resolved a little too easily. This is where the movie begins to look like a TV soap whose storylines have to be wrapped up within the hour (and the final montage with sad music ranging across all the patients verges on cliche). But Benesch brings a tough, smart, credible presence. Late Shift is in UK and Irish cinemas from 1 August.
New York Times
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A ‘Nurse Action Movie' Might Be Different, but That's the Point
The German actress Leonie Benesch appears in every scene of Petra Volpe's 'Late Shift,' a tense drama about a night nurse in an understaffed hospital. The film, which screens at the inaugural edition of South by Southwest London on Tuesday in its British debut, follows Benesch's character, Floria, over the course of a single night. She rushes from bedside to bedside, bringing patients painkillers or peppermint tea and calms their nerves by trying to get hold of a doctor — or just by singing to them. To prepare for the role, Benesch said she shadowed nurses in a hospital for a week, learning to handle medical equipment and internalizing the rhythm of care work. 'I wanted to understand the choreography and how do they move. How do they interact with patients? What's the code-switching between talking to one another and talking to patients?' Benesch, 34, said in an interview. 'The challenge for me,' she added, 'was that a health care professional watch this and go: She could be one of us.' The actress spoke in May from a hotel bar in Cardiff, Wales, in crisp British-accented English. She was in Wales filming the political thriller 'Prisoner,' the sort of large-budget international television production that dots her résumé along with smaller art house films. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
