Nonstop

BBC radio show highlights new Swiss film about a tough nursing shift

In July 2025 the BBC radio show The Arts Hour featured writer-director Petra Volpe, who discussed her film The Late Shift. The movie follows a nurse through one intense hospital shift, on which she gives expert care but struggles with dangerous understaffing. The BBC segment offered a valuable look at the state of nursing.

March 20, 2026 – On a July 2025 edition of the weekly BBC radio show The Arts Hour, Petra Volpe discussed her film The Late Shift, which focuses on one harrowing shift for a Swiss hospital nurse named Floria. The movie, which opens in U.S. theaters today, made the 15-film Oscar shortlist for best international feature. Arts Hour host Nikki Bedi gushed over the film, and she gave writer-director Volpe plenty of time to discuss it. One focus was the lead performance of the German actress Leonie Benesch. Volpe described how her work with Benesch involved conveying the mentally and physically “athletic” aspects of nursing. Volpe stressed that the understaffing the character faced was a common and highly damaging phenomenon. She explained that it prevents nurses from providing psychosocial care and causes them distress, in part because of the abuse they absorb from dissatisfied patients. More could have been said about understaffing’s effects on physical care, something the film itself includes. Volpe did emphasize that she wanted to focus on Floria’s professionalism, rather than personal issues, because typical media depictions of hospital settings tend to focus on physicians and relegate nurses to the background, even though in reality nurses are central players in clinical care. That is a critical point. We thank Bedi and the BBC for highlighting a film that gives viewers an unusually good sense of what nurses can do for patients, as well as the threats posed by today’s rampant understaffing.

Mental and physical athletes

On The Arts Hour, host Nikki Bedi is typically joined by one or more “cultural critics” who discuss with her the various works featured on the show. On occasion the show will have one of the featured artists in this role, and on a weekly edition released at the end of July 2025 that was Volpe, who appeared along with journalist William Lee Adams. At the start of the show, Bedi described The Late Shift as “absolutely stunning and compelling.” She discussed other media items with Volpe and Adams, then returned to Volpe’s film in a substantial segment toward the end of the hour. Bedi noted that Volpe is known for her socially-engaged storytelling, as seen in her 2017 film The Divine Order, which depicts the efforts of Swiss women to gain the right to vote. The Late Shift, Bedi said, is a taut and gripping film with the great actress Benesch as Floria, “a dedicated nurse navigating one night on an understaffed Swiss hospital ward.” 

Bedi was very interested in Benesch’s performance. Volpe said that because the film is a “love declaration” to nurses and nursing, they needed someone who seemed authentic to nurses themselves. Bedi noted that the role has Benesch moving

practically nonstop, and we experience the precision, the minutiae of every procedure; she comes across as utterly believable, hugely competent as a professional nurse.

Volpe explained that they saw the role as very athletic, and that observing hospital nurses was like watching “mental and physical athletes.” Benesch wanted to play the role as an “action character,” because nurses are constantly in motion. So a nurse consultant “basically trained her like an athlete, she trained all the technical things a nurse has to do.” Volpe said that did not take too long, because Benesch has a great physical intelligence, and she is disciplined and would practice at her hotel. 

Bedi praised the balance between compassion and professionalism the film shows, and she asked Volpe about how much of that was due to the script as opposed to the direction. Volpe said a lot was in the screenplay, which nurses helped her to write. Volpe noted that they also had to balance time spent with Floria’s patients. The nurse could never stay long with any of them because she was constantly due elsewhere. Volpe wanted the audience to experience the stress and feel exhausted by the end, to give them a sense of what Floria goes through.  

Bedi was struck by the role of an entitled private insurance patient character, referring to a wealthy patient who basically treated Floria like a servant. Volpe said she wanted to present a mosaic of different types of patients she had encountered, and specifically with that patient, to show that even for a patient with money, the nurse “can’t split herself in two.” Volpe went on to argue that this patient’s sense of entitlement was not just connected to his private status, but that many people now seem to feel more entitled in hospitals, to nurses’ detriment. She said that 

there is more and more violence against nurses worldwide, and people tend to feel very entitled, very unempathetic, very unaware of the situation in hospitals, how it’s usually systemic that there’s not enough nurses, and it’s not the fault of the nurses that the tea isn’t coming immediately, and I think we really wanted to build awareness for that…

Although Floria is one of only two nurses on the unit, she still finds time to calm a confused elderly woman and to support a young mother with cancer, as Bedi noted. Bedi was especially struck by how Floria would sit on the patients’ beds to connect with them. Volpe said her research indicated that many nurses do their work because they want to connect, they have empathy, and they want to help people on their journey to become healthy again. But she returned to the understaffing, emphasizing that now nurses often can’t make those connections or provide that support, and that takes a big emotional toll on them. She also wanted to be sure listeners understood that although Bedi had called it a “crazy shift,” it was actually a “pretty normal shift” for nurses all over the world, as nurses at screenings of the film had confirmed. 

Bedi observed that the film does not provide much information about Floria’s personal life. Volpe used that inquiry as a way to direct the discussion to the nurse’s professionalism in a social environment in which there are still many “distorted ideas” about the profession. Volpe wanted to focus on Floria’s commitment to her work, without personal distractions. She added:  

I feel like in television series often, it never centers around the nurses, it’s usually around the doctors, even in great shows like The Pitt. The main characters are the doctors, and there’s one important nurse, but the central characters are usually the doctors, and very often in the traditional hospital series, the nurse puts up an IV in the background and that’s it. But in reality, the nurse is really next to you, the nurse is at your bed, the nurse notices if something changes in your health status, and we really wanted to show and honor that. 

Wrapping up, Bedi said that her mother was a nurse, and the critic Adams added that his father was as well. Adams noted that he was still catching his breath, apparently because just talking about the movie, like seeing it, was like being on a treadmill where the speed kept increasing.

This was a great look at The Late Shift. That was not just because of Bedi’s boundless enthusiasm for the movie, but also because she gave Volpe the space to explain key points, especially about the prevalence and effects of understaffing. More might have been said about the physical suffering and danger caused by understaffing, in addition to how it impairs nurses’ ability to connect with patients. The segment was also effective because of Volpe, who had clearly made a serious effort to understand the current situation of nursing and was an insightful observer. In particular, it’s easy to miss the critical point Volpe made about depictions of nurses in popular media, even in media products that are dramatically compelling and/or socially constructive. The Pitt is the perfect example of a serious, globally influential show with much to say about the state of modern health care. But its presentation of nurses remains mostly that of a collection of modestly skilled workers who don’t have an autonomous scope of practice, but instead serve the physicians who call the shots and do virtually all of the important work. 

We thank The Arts Hour and the BBC. Listen to the BBC interview “Writer director Petra Volpe on her film Late Shift” on the BBC.

Click here to see our review of the movie and how you can see it.

See the trailer:

Nikki Bedi talks to Swiss-Italian director Petra Volpe about her gripping film, Late Shift and is joined by cultural critic William Lee Adams.

U.S. release date March 20, 2026; German-speaking nations release Feb. 2025, elsewhere in Europe mid-2025

Please go see The Late Shift in theaters starting today! It is the perfect film to show your friends and family who may have no idea what you do or how important it is.