Interview With "Late Shift" Filmmaker Petra Volpe

The Next Best Picture Podcast

Tv & Film

4.2 • 542 Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2026

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"Late Shift" is a drama film written and directed by Petra Volpe, inspired by the book "Unser Beruf ist nicht das Problem: Es sind die Umstände" by Madeline Calvelage. Starring Leonie Benesch, the film centers on a young nurse, Floria, who works with unwavering dedication in an understaffed hospital ward, but on this day, her shift becomes a nerve-racking race against time. The film had its world premiere in the Berlinale Special Gala section of the 75th Berlin International Film Festival last year. It received positive reviews and was selected as the Swiss entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards, making the December shortlist. Volpe was kind enough to spend some time talking with us about her work and experience making the film, which you can listen to below. Please be sure to check out the film, which is now playing in New York at The Quad Cinema and Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal, and will be followed by a nationwide rollout from Music Box Films. Thank you, and enjoy! Check out more on NextBestPicture.com Please subscribe on... Apple Podcasts - https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/negs-best-film-podcast/id1087678387?mt=2 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/7IMIzpYehTqeUa1d9EC4jT YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWA7KiotcWmHiYYy6wJqwOw And be sure to help support us on Patreon for as little as $1 a month at https://www.patreon.com/NextBestPicture and listen to this podcast ad-free Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to The Next Best Picture Podcast, and this is Nadia Dalamonte's interview with the director and writer for late shift. Petra Volpe. Hi. Hello. Zara is a chronic. We're only two with the first semester school. I've seen. Floria! I'm not. I have you. I have you what I've got you. I have a very strong smear of the shorthy. It's all right. We're today only two. Lent, third
0:24.7	stock. Is that de la beer? No, champagne. I'm
0:30.2	very alone. I'm very much.
0:32.2	Thank you.
0:33.2	Cantonspital, third-stop, Floria Lint.
0:37.2	I want He'll haiga. Morning can you you to go. Now is time to sit here, Floria, third stop. Frau Lauber, I have she not forgotten, yeah. All right. Hi, Petra. I'm Nadia with next to this picture. Hi, Nadia. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you too. It's lovely to meet to you and I'm so excited
0:55.8	to talk to you about your film Late Shift, which is an incredibly visceral love letter to nurses
1:02.7	that also plays out like a tense thriller. And it's a brilliant film and I'm curious to know
1:08.1	when you were thinking about the subject of nursing staff,
1:12.0	how did you land on the idea of one nurse working one shift as the focus for the story?
1:19.2	Actually, I was inspired by a book. So I had been thinking about the topic for many,
1:24.1	many years, even before COVID and thinking about, if I make a movie about nursing,
1:29.6	what would be the form of the movie and have experimented with many different genres.
1:34.3	But then I read a book by Madeline Kalbalash, who just describes one shift, and it read like
1:40.4	a thriller, really, like two pages in, My heart was racing and I was stressed. I almost
1:46.8	broke out in sweat. And I thought, this is what she does every day. And it's a thriller. And I thought,
1:52.1	this is the movie. It's one shift, one nurse. So she became a consultant on the script, but the shift,
2:00.5	how it unfolds is not like in her book. It's like based
2:03.1	on a lot of research I did later. Like I had a lot of conversations with nurses. I went to the
2:08.2	hospital myself. Madeline was my consultant. I had a Swiss nurse consulting me. So the way
2:14.6	it unfolds in a movie little by little came together through a lot of conversations, observations, and so forth.
2:21.3	And when I pitched to my producer, I said, it's one shift, one nurse.
	...

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