Swiss Oscar Hopeful ‘Late Shift’ Immerses Audiences in the Heroics of Nursing

Late Shiftthe 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.

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 US 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.”

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 Jackiewhich is a fantastic show. I love it. But it’s [typically] the doctors who are the main characters. But in fact, in real life, the main characters on a ward are the nurses. Those are the people who are closest to the patients, who really know what’s going on, who know everything about their relatives, who can tell if something changes in a patient. What happens in the media is that they minimize the nurses’ work. And we really wanted to show that these people are center stage in a person’s well-being on a hospital ward.”

Benesch reflects: “I don’t think I’ve ever made a film where I was so obviously on the right side of history.” She adds, “It’s really a love letter to the profession. And it’s nice to be part of something that is this clear in its ambition.”

The clarity is also reflected in the film’s original German title, Heldinor heroine. “I love the German title, and I stuck with it, even though, in the medical community, it’s not undisputed,” Volpe says. “From my perspective as a potential patient, these women… are everyday heroes, and I’m confidently calling them that in the film. I love the strength of the word and also the context of the word that is usually used more for men and war. But I think there are a lot of women who are heroes.”

The English title, Late Shiftavoids confusion with the drug heroin, which Volpe felt would have distracted from the film’s intent. “If I say I made a movie called Heroineeverybody will think it’s the drug,” Volpe notes. “And that’s not good for a movie. I don’t want to have to explain anything. So, the English title is very sober. There’s something about it that I really liked, and I thought it was better for the English title.”

Although the movie wasn’t shot in a single take, it was designed to feel that way. “In the beginning, I actually had the crazy idea to do it in one shot,” Volpe tells THR. “But we wanted to make people feel like it’s seamless. So, we start the movie with very long shots, because we really want the camera to always reflect Floria’s state of mind and energy and flow. She’s young, she’s motivated, she loves her job, and we just flow with her through the corridor and into the rooms and out again. We wanted to start with this flow of her work energy, and then as the day progresses and it becomes more stressful, things become more fragmented.”

Benesch found the emotional side of the role unexpectedly challenging. “Because I was so busy preparing for the physicality of it, and learning all the equipment, I underestimated the emotional side of it,” she says. “I don’t usually find it tricky to access emotional sides of characters. But it wasn’t as easy in this case, because it’s a character who is busy. Most of the time in the film on that shift, she is confronted with needing patience and having to hide what she’s actually feeling whenever someone else is looking into her face. So, an emotional breakdown, I found trickier than I usually would, because I underestimated the difficulty of navigating that a little bit.”

The response from colleagues and industry insiders has been unusually warm. “I never got so many nice letters from colleagues, directing colleagues and writing colleagues,” Volpe shares. “And also actresses. Everybody has just been so supportive of the movie. And it’s really cool that we are the Swiss submission for the Academy Awards. The nurses in Switzerland and Germany are so excited about this. They say: ‘Our job in Hollywood? They’re going to see our movie.’ It’s really something that has made them so proud. They are all crossing their fingers.”

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