Leonie Benesch

Late Shift

by
Floria in uniform in front of a patient's bed

There’s a crusading aspect to Late Shift, made explicit in an on-screen endnote about the shortage of nurses worldwide. Focus on a particular to create the universal is the idea, Petra Volpe’s film following a single nurse for a single night as she deals with patients in an understaffed Swiss hospital. The writer/director is lucky to have Leonie Benesch as her star. She’s particularly skilled at playing woman out of their depth, both in the public sector (as in 2023’s The Teachers’ Lounge) but more generally too – see 2024’s September 5, or the early episodes of German TV show Babylon Berlin, which lost a lot of heft when she left. Here, it’s … Read more

September 5

by
Close up of John Magaro

Cool rather than hot, and about events not as they happened but as they were reported, September 5 is the story behind the story, of how a sports team from ABC TV found themselves at the cutting edge of a major news event at the 1972 Olympics, when a group of Israeli athletes were taken hostage by a terrorist group, Black September, as 900 million viewers around the globe looked on. Mark Spitz winning seven swimming Gold medals, Olga Korbut performing her Dead Loop on the asymmetric bars, Munich is remembered for many things, but probably most of all for the moment when the German Olympic authorities’ attempt to perform a hard reset … Read more

The Teachers’ Lounge

by
Clara Nowak loses her cool

Instructive but not didactic – and also as tense as hell – The Teachers’ Lounge (Das Lehrerzimmer) takes a fairly simple situation and not only escalates it but pushes it out in all directions. Good guys and bad guys are there none, or not, at least, any that we can quite get a glove on. We’re in a German school where someone has been stealing stuff from the staff room. It’s one of the kids, is the feeling, since what adult would do such a thing? As the action opens Clara Nowak, an idealistic new teacher, is trying to prevent her class of kids from being physically searched. She’s unsuccessful and the search does … Read more