INTERVIEW: In ‘Late Shift,’ the hard work of nurses comes into focus
Photo: Leonie Benesch stars in Late Shift. Photo courtesy of Music Box Films / Provided by Hook Publicity with permission.
Director Petra Volpe has crafted a new film that pays respect to the difficulties that are present in the nursing profession. Late Shift, starring Leonie Benesch, opens today, March 20, in New York City at the Quad Cinema and Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal, followed by a nationwide rollout, according to press notes.
In the film, Floria (Benesch) is followed as she works the midnight shift at a hospital in Switzerland. There are two dozen patients and only two nurses and one trainee on shift, which means it’s not going to be an easy night of care.
“There’s a lot of wrong ideas about nurses and a distorted image of nursing,” Volpe said in a recent Zoom interview. “[In most films, doctors] are the main characters in the narrative, and the nurses are somewhere in the background, with very, very few exceptions. But everybody who has been to a hospital knows that for them one of the other main characters is the nurse. I don’t want to diminish the work of doctors, but I really wanted to set it right and focus on that very important and largely invisible work that’s done mainly by women. Eighty percent are women, and that’s also, of course, the reason why it’s undervalued, it’s underestimated, it’s underpaid, it’s under-respected and so forth.”
Volpe had been thinking about the topic of nursing well before the COVID-19 pandemic, but that worldwide crisis accelerated her thinking. She saw images in 2020 and 2021 of communities celebrating nurses, clapping for them and sending them fruit baskets.
“It was just very interesting and symptomatic that the moment COVID was gone, it disappeared again,” she said. “You could read in the media that there’s a shortage of nurses, that nurses worldwide were fighting for better work conditions but not being taken seriously, and it just started building up in my head that I think it’s an important topic to make a move about. We really shed a light on a profession that is so extremely important for all of us because we’re all potential patients basically, and how are they not taken seriously when they ring the bell of alarm.”
The character of Floria is an amalgam of several different inspirations. Volpe conducted a lot of research before writing the script; she interviewed dozens of nurses, read books about the profession and even had a consultant help with the dialogue.
“I was at the hospital myself and observed for many days the pace and the work and the tone, so she’s kind of like the quintessential outcome of my observations,” Volpe said of the Floria character. “It was really important to show a woman who is very motivated and young and has a lot of energy, and yet she can’t really win that game because it’s just physics. One person cannot be in two places, and that’s the drama of a nurse. She has to constantly do understaffed work. She has to constantly do triage and decide do I go into this room or that room, and it can be a decision of life and death. So they have an enormous responsibility that people aren’t aware of. They always think it’s just the doctor, but it’s the nurses who observe the patient throughout the day and notice when things change for the worse.”
In Volpe’s mind, today’s nursing community is under too much stress, and these professionals are unable to complete their job under such demanding conditions. The director flat out said the work can be heartbreaking.
“Nurses show up, and they deal with a lot of stress,” she said. “They try to stay on top of the shift, but in the evening they go home and feel they haven’t really done the best for their patients. They have to be scared that they made a mistake, so they can’t even really relax. This is a moral injury that keeps building, and it’s actually the cause for burnout more than anything else, that feeling of I’ve done everything, yet it wasn’t enough for my patients. And I even have to fear for their lives because I might have made a mistake, so that was for me so heartbreaking.”
Volpe added: “It’s such a short-sided situation because it’s not going to benefit us in the end. Their good work condition actually benefits us as potential patients as well, so the nurses who are striking in New York, they’re also striking for patient safety. They’re not striking just for a better pay. They’re on strike to have better outcomes for their patients. They should all get our support.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Late Shift, written and directed by Petra Volpe, opens today, March 20, in New York City and Los Angeles. Click here for more information.
