The healthcare crisis is on a lot of creative’s mind these days: There are at least four new medical TV shows in 2025, including The Pitt, Pulse, St. Denis Medical and Berlin ER. Science skepticism, insurance battles and understaffed hospitals are not only domestic themes, they are worldwide issues.

In The Late Shift, writer-director Petra Volpe (The Divine Order) explores the reality of a nurse in an understaffed hospital in her home country of Switzerland. The film is Switzerland’s entry in the non-English-language category, which has a strong lineup this year, as well as being a contender in many other categories.

Based in Berlin and New York, Volpe spoke to us about the frustration and heroism (the original German film title Heldin means heroine) of the people who take care of us during our most difficult moments, and how the themes in the film took a sudden personal turn during production.

What is the origin story of Late Shift?

My original interest in the topic did arise while living with a nurse. She was in touch with existential questions on a daily basis. It was her job to deal with death and fear and relatives and illness, all these big taboo topics of our society. I was in awe of that. We take these people for granted. I was looking for a form to tell a story about caretakers or nurses for quite a long time. I didn’t quite find the angle. Then I read a book by the German nurse Madeline Calvelage in which she describes just a shift, and just after two pages, my heart was already racing. I felt this reads like a thriller. That gave me the genre or form for the film. Madeleine became a consultant on the project and I did many interviews with nurses in Switzerland, Germany, and in the U.S.

How did you work with actress Leonie Benesch to make everything look so real and authentic?

Leonie is an incredibly physical actress and also very natural. I loved her so much in The Teacher’s Lounge but didn’t dare to ask her, because I thought she wouldn’t be interested to play another professional in a one-location setting. After a wide casting I still hadn’t found my nurse, so I asked her. I think what appealed to her was the physicality. The nurse is always in motion, it is basically an action movie and very choreographed. We had to break down all the activities a nurse does. We had a coach that trained Leonie like an athlete. She would take syringes and the IVs home and work with them in the hotel room, while watching TV until she could handle them blindly. She was also in a hospital for a week shadowing nurses. My DP Judith Kaufmann and I were there to film and to really understand the rhythm and pace of nurses.

Where did you eventually shoot?

We shot in an old hospital in Switzerland that was going to be torn down. Unfortunately, everything had just been emptied out and shipped to Ukraine to support the hospitals there, so my production designer had to find all the beds which we got from Germany, but they wouldn’t fit through the doors in Switzerland…We wanted the hospital to look good. The means are there in Switzerland. It’s about priorities: if there’s not enough nurses, state of the art technology doesn’t help. We wanted to show what an understaffed ward means for the patients and the nurses.

Why do you think we see a lot of new medical themed content this year?

Medical shows make for good entertainment because it’s high drama, and very often about life and death. But in media, how nurses are portrayed is very distorted and often they are not the main characters. The doctors are. In reality, nurses have a tremendous responsibility. They are the people who are the closest to the patients. They monitor them and get to know all their stories. The response to the movie in Germany and Switzerland and also other European countries in the nursing community was tremendous because they felt represented and seen. It’s very symptomatic also that nursing is so under-appreciated because it’s traditionally a woman’s job.

Do you hope the film will help bring change for caretakers?

Yes, I hope that the film can help nurses in their fight for better work conditions and respect. During COVID, we were very aware of how relevant they were, and then we forgot it again. Cinema is a way to create empathy and awareness. The unions in Switzerland have been using the film as a cry to arms, to mobilize their members and the people at large to fight alongside them. The nurses in the United States I’m following on Instagram — they’re at the heart of pushing back against what’s happening now with the cuts to Medicaid because they are extremely affected by it. What struck me most though, is the moral injury, as it’s called in care work. The biggest issue isn’t necessarily getting paid more. What’s hardest for nurses who really want to help people, is when they feel they can’t help because the system prevents them to do so.

Your mother was hospitalized during the shooting of Late Shift. How did this affect your work on the film?

It was extremely emotional. My mother was also on a [gastroenterology] ward, like in the film. I would visit her in the morning and talk to the nurses and doctors there. I would find myself being like one of the relatives in my film and then go back to set and shoot a scene with similar dialogue. Reality and fiction started to mix. It was very scary to see my mother so vulnerable and I was very grateful for every form of kindness she experienced in the hospital. I didn’t take it for granted because I knew these nurses are so stressed and they took the time to talk to my mother and explain everything to me and my mother what was going to happen.

Your DP, production designer and composer are all female. Was that a conscious decision?

I work with a lot of women because I think the women I work with are the best artists. I also worked with my producer Reto Schaerli for many years. We are a very close knit team. My DP Judith Kaufmann shot all my films and is involved very early on. I run a lot of ideas by her. For this film, I had a clear vision that it needed to be a single perspective. It’s only nurse Floria and we are completely in her world. We are not giving the patients a perspective, because we really want to show what it means that Floria can only be with her patients for as long as she can and not give the audience more time with patients than she has. The aim for the whole team was also how to make the film a physical experience. We wanted people to feel physically exhausted after the movie, like they themselves worked a shift. And how do we achieve that in 95 minutes when it takes place in reality over ten hours. Where is the drama and where are the things we don’t normally think about when we think about nurses, like the medicine: nurses don’t just go into the pharmacy and pop out a pill. It’s usually a process. It struck me when I went to observe them, how long it takes and how mentally focused they have to be not to make mistakes measuring smallest amounts and diluting them in other smallest amounts.

What are you working on now?

I shot Frank & Louis right after this film and I am currently in postproduction. It’s my English-language debut. I’ve been working on the story about Alzheimer’s and dementia in an American men’s prison for ten years. It’s inspired by a program in the men’s colony in San Luis Obispo, California. We shot the movie last winter and spring with Kingsley Ben-Adir and Rob Morgan in the principal roles. I’m very excited to finish it by the end of the year and  have it start its journey into the world in 2026.