A young father with a teenage son, an English working-class neighborhood, a great musical song and tons of visual lyricism. Andrea Banjanin seems to have taken good note of Andrea Arnold’s cinema. The cinematic video clip for ‘Giving Up Air’ could have been taken from one of the British director’s films: from ‘Fish Tank’ or ‘Bird’ (try to imagine Michael Fassbender or Barry Keoghan in the role of the father), to ‘Red Road’ and its iconic concrete towers.
One of the most notable elements of the video is precisely the prominence of a tower. London’s Trellick Tower is one of those concrete masses that at the time caused the same fear as the architecture of Ceaușescu’s Bucharest (“Tower of Terror”, they called it). Conceived as social housing in the seventies, its ground floor housed more junkies than Chueca in the eighties. Today, however, it has become an icon of the most extreme brutalist architecture.
On the 23rd floor of that tower begins the story of ‘Giving Up Air’: a story about the progressive rapprochement between a father and son estranged by what, as vocalist Dougy Mandagi has explained – “a life-changing moment and the unimaginable pain of losing a loved one in tragic circumstances” – could be the death of the mother.
Through a montage structured through a father-son visual dialectic, with shots of one and the other in permanent dialogue, the narrative gradually brings the protagonists closer until leading to an emotional ending: a reunion resolved with a beautiful cathartic dance.
