Completing The Shift

Danish director Lone Scherfig tells DQ how she delivered medical drama Ellas Vagt (The Shift), in which Sofie Gråbøl stars as the head of a busy maternity unit.

Danish director Lone Scherfig was nominated for an Oscar for her 2010 feature An Education, while her other big-screen credits include The Birthday Trip, On Our Own, Italian for Beginners, One Day and The Kindness of Strangers.

She now lands on television with her latest project, Ellas Vagt (The Shift), in which she explores life inside the busy maternity ward of a Danish hospital, where the close-knit team – led by Forbrydelsen (The Killing) star Sofie Gråbøl – go about their work with passion and enthusiasm but are all too often weighed down by the pressure and enormous mental and physical strain of their work.

Here, Scherfig discusses her move to television, her interest in exploring a group of people who work in a maternity ward, tapping into ‘Nordic light’ and how she took the lead as the show’s head writer and showrunner.

The Shift is produced by Creative Alliance for Denmark’s TV2 and distributed by Beta Film.

tagged in: Beta Film, Creative Alliance, Ellas Vagt, Lone Scherfig speaks, The Shift, TV2