\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>he 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Arriving for her shift cheery and energetic and taking the time to ask about her colleague\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The Swiss-born Volpe says she chose the film\u2019s German title Heldin<\/em> (Heroine) because it took a mythic term often reserved for warriors and applied it to the bravery and self-sacrifice of care work.<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018The work is extremely complex and emotionally charged\u2019 \u2026 Leonie Benesch in Late Shift.<\/span> Photograph: Salvatore Vinci<\/p>\n \u201cThis work, which is extremely complex and emotionally charged, is completely devalued in our societies,\u201d Volpe says. \u201cI find it very symptomatic because it\u2019s women\u2019s work \u2013 80% of the people [in many countries] who do this work are female.\u201d<\/p>\n Volpe was inspired by a longtime roommate who worked as a nurse, and by the autobiographical novel Our Profession Is Not the Problem \u2013 It\u2019s the Circumstances by German former care worker Madeline Calvelage, who advised her on the script.<\/p>\n \u201cMy heart was pounding from the first chapter and I thought to myself \u2013 this reads like a thriller,\u201d Volpe says. \u201cBut within that stress you find the most tender, human moments.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Benesch\u2019s turbo-driven career has already included roles on The Crown and Babylon Berlin as well as film parts in Michael Haneke\u2019s The White Ribbon, Munich Olympics attacks drama September 5 and German Oscar nominee The Teachers\u2019 Lounge. She says a common thread in her most recent characters is \u201cpeople who burn for what they do\u201d. But she notes it was rare in TV medical dramas to see nurses and their everyday feats front and centre.<\/p>\n <\/span>Nursing staff from various hospitals in Berlin demonstrate in front of the Zoo Palast on the fringes of the premiere of Heldin in February.<\/span> Photograph: Dpa Picture Alliance\/Alamy<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re 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,\u201d Benesch says. \u201cBefore this it wasn\u2019t clear to me how much of the actual medical responsibility rests on nurses\u2019 shoulders.\u201d<\/p>\n Benesch, who trained at London\u2019s Guildhall School of Music & Drama, said she spent several shifts trailing real nurses at a Swiss hospital to learn the \u201cchoreography\u201d of interactions between staff and patients, and the manual skills of prepping a syringe or taking blood pressure. \u201cI wanted real nurses not to be able to tell the difference between me and a professional,\u201d she says. \u201cI just hope people aren\u2019t scared off by a film with subtitles because the story is absolutely universal.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s general election, some held #wirsindfloria (We Are Floria) signs.<\/p>\n One of those guests was Ingo B\u00f6ing, 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. \u201cIt was incredibly moving,\u201d he says of the film gala. \u201cWatching several of the scenes I thought \u2018Wow, that\u2019s really how it is.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n B\u00f6ing says Late Shift does a convincing job depicting the \u201cvicious circle\u201d 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. \u201cIt\u2019s that feeling of trying to meet so many needs at once and not managing,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Franziska Aurich, 28, who works on a cancer ward at Berlin\u2019s Charit\u00e9 hospital, also found the film \u201cvery close to reality\u201d. Asked what she\u2019d advise Floria, Aurich says: \u201cI would say go back to work tomorrow because like her I can\u2019t imagine doing anything else with my life. But join a union, so you don\u2019t have as many shifts like this one.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. \u201cNurses should be at the very top of our social hierarchy but we live in a world where it\u2019s just the opposite,\u201d she says. \u201cThis film is a love letter to the profession.\u201d<\/p>\n While the film is set in Europe\u2019s creaking but still intact social infrastructure, Volpe said she saw in the US where Donald Trump\u2019s swingeing cuts to Medicaid, which mainly serves poor and disabled people, threatened to hurt the most vulnerable. \u201cYou see a great cruelty in all these measures,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cElon 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\u2019re all going to be dependent on that person standing by the bed.\u201d<\/p>\n Late Shift will be released in the UK and Ireland on 1 August<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[4222,6696,896,1171,70,1394,6352,6695,6694],"class_list":{"0":"post-12996","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health","8":"tag-alarm","9":"tag-causing","10":"tag-europe","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-hit","13":"tag-movies","14":"tag-nurses","15":"tag-overworked","16":"tag-shocking"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}