Late Shift

Petra Volpe's Late Shift (Heldin) premiered in the Berlinale Panorama at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2025. The film consolidated Volpe, the Swiss-Italian director previously best known for The Divine Order (2017), as one of the most internationally consequential contemporary Swiss directors. Leonie Benesch, in the central role, continues her late-2010s and 2020s career trajectory through major German-language television and film work (Babylon Berlin, The Crown, Ilker Çatak's The Teachers' Lounge).

Floria (Benesch) is a surgical-ward nurse on a Swiss hospital floor for a single overnight shift, one nurse short on a busy ward. The film unfolds in something close to real time across approximately ninety minutes, what starts as a manageable night of routine care (medication rounds, bedside reassurance, the small intimacies of shared corridor work with one other nurse and one trainee) accumulates into a sustained reflection on what it actually takes to provide medical care in the contemporary European hospital system. Alireza Bayram, Sonja Riesen and Jasmin Mattei anchor the supporting cast of patients and colleagues.

Volpe's commitment to procedural realism (actual hospital-shift logistics, accurate Swiss healthcare-system politics, real ward-nursing physical labour) produced one of the most quietly affecting recent works of European medical-drama cinema. The film operates simultaneously as character study, healthcare-system document, and sustained tribute to the largely-invisible labour of nursing. Benesch's central performance is among the most-committed of her career.