With Heldin, Swiss director Petra Biondina Volpe creates an oppressive but extremely empathetic ode to nurses. During a single shift, we follow Floria (Leonie Benesch) in a chronically understaffed surgical ward. While the telephone rings incessantly and beeps, calls and requests jostle for attention, she tries to give each of her patients the care and attention they deserve.  

From preparing medication to brief, intimate moments of humanity – a chat with a lonely patient, a lollipop for a child – everything contributes to a picture of a caregiver who carries on undeterred, even as signs of fatigue and stress become increasingly apparent. Heldin not only shows the stamina of one nurse, but also exposes a broader, structural reality: a healthcare system in which people sooner or later become burnt out. 

Heldin makes tangible what the figures at the end of the film confirm: after four years, more than a third of nurses have already left the profession.