Leonie Benesch in 'Late Shift.' Music Box Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment Late Shift, the latest film from writer-director Petra Volpe (Dreamland, The Divine Order), stars Leonie Benesch (The Teacher's Lounge, September 5, Babylon Berlin) as an overworked yet tireless nurse navigating an overstretched hospital ward. The visceral Swiss drama has been taking audiences' breath away in more ways than one. Switzerland selected the movie as its submission for the 2026 best international feature film Oscar race, and cinematographer Judith Kaufmann recently took home the Golden Frog at Camerimage's main competition. Related Stories Movies Is Kevin James Doing a Stealth Marketing Campaign for His New Film? News Sophie Kinsella, Beloved 'Shopaholic' Novelist, Dies at 55 The film, which has also attracted support from Peter Sarsgaard - who interviewed Volpe and Benesch for a video featured by THR - follows Floria (Benesch) over the course of a single shift, as routine pressures escalate into a tense, emotionally charged race against time. Sonja Riesen, Urs Bihler, Margherita Schoch and Urbain Guiguemdé round out the cast. TrustNordisk is handling sales, with producers Reto Schaerli and Lukas Hobi, and co-producer Bastie Griese. Watch a trailer for Late Shift here: If watching the trailer leaves you short of breath, Volpe would be pleased. "We wanted people to really have a physical experience, not just make a movie that you watch and lean back for," she tells THR. "We wanted people's hearts to race and put them in the shoes of a nurse for just 90 minutes. And imagine doing that for 10 hours!" For Volpe, "the inspiration was personal, but also political." She explains: "I lived with a nurse for a really long time and observed how she felt when she came home. And I was just always in awe of what she did on a daily basis. Everything I did felt quite banal compared to what she confronted every day - death, illness, loneliness, old age, all of that. And we take this for granted. There are these women, and it's predominantly women out there, who do this on a daily basis." Volpe chose to set the film within a single shift after extensive research, including reading Madeline Calvelage's Our Profession Is Not the Problem - It's the Circumstances and interviewing dozens of nurses in Switzerland, Germany and the U.S. She and Kaufmann also spent several days on a ward to understand the pace and rhythm of nurses' work. "Little by little, with the help of nurses who consulted me, all the patient stories came together, the shift, the illnesses," she says. "The dramaturgy of escalation was then very carefully constructed [based on] the principle of Albert Camus who said fiction is the lie that tells the truth." Benesch embraced the challenge of stepping into a nurse's shoes. "Petra didn't send me the script at first, because there was a concern that maybe it would be too similar for me to play another stressed out woman in a work environment like in The Teacher's Lounge," she tells THR. "However, when she did eventually send it to me, it was very obvious that there was this specificity of the structure of the script. Every single patient's diagnosis is very dramaturgically and really, really cleverly placed. The spiral of escalation is really fun to play. For me as an actor, it's a brilliant challenge, because that character is an athlete. She never stops. It's a movement piece." To inhabit Floria authentically, Benesch trained to "imitate" all medical procedures, from handling syringes to IVs. "The way the character moves through her work environment has to look so seamless and second nature," she explains. "That's a brilliant challenge as an actor to try and figure that out. I got to be a fly on the wall in a hospital for five shifts and actually meet nurses and be there for some of these shifts and talk to them. We've heard it a million times, and it's a bit banal, but it is true: As an actor, you do get to peek into other people's lives, or their profession, in a way that is absolutely enriching. And in this case, it is also very humbling." Late Shift star Leonie Benesch, left, and director Petra Volpe. Courtesy of Berlin Film Festival Benesch notes there were few visual references to draw on: "We've not seen this profession really portrayed well on film or television. So I didn't have anything to go back to. And I knew it was going to have to be about the way my hands move in the portrayal, because I knew that the camera was going to be on my hands way more." "We wanted people to see how she puts the syringe into a patient," adds Volpe. "We wanted to really create this sense of realism. Most medical shows center around the doctors, except for one show - that's Nurse Jackie, which is a fantastic show. I love it. But it's [typically] th