Ren – Hi Ren
2022 · Directed by Ren
1.7M Likes
Best comments
1.“It's like Shakespeare was reborn, learned guitar, wrote a rap lyric and staged his own performance.”
More comments
- 2.“I'm a psychiatric nurse. I actually learned about you from another psych nurse. Your music is spreading and inspiring both patients and staff. It makes a difference. It really does.”
- 3.“I'd never had a song make me cry before. Today is 29 days sober. Fuck the cravings – I'm making it to 29 years. Edit: 7 and a half months and counting. Edit 2: Still going strong – 2 years! Edit 3: Well past 3 years. Life's been tough, but I'm still squeaky clean.”
The story
Ren Gill got sick while recording his debut album and stayed sick for years. Doctors called it depression, then bipolar disorder, then chronic fatigue syndrome. At his worst he was in bed up to 23 hours a day, and the stress pushed him into psychosis. Nobody diagnosed Lyme disease until 2015, and experimental stem cell treatment in the US finally gave him back part of his life.
Hi Ren is what he made out of all that: a nine-minute argument between Ren and the darker voice in his own head – the one that belittles him, then takes over, then finally loses. He wrote it, performed it and directed it himself, with Samuel Perry-Falvey as cinematographer. A pig-masked man in a bloody apron wheels him into a filthy room with peeling walls and two lamps. Ren sits in a hospital gown with a guitar in his lap. The whole song was recorded live in one take, a tiny mic clipped to his gown and four cameras trading angles. The lamps flicker, the guitar tunings shift with his mood, and by the end he's on his feet, unplugging the guitar.
No label. He put it out himself in December 2022 and asked fans to share it. They did. Almost seven million views in two months, a TikTok clip with twelve million more, a spot on YouTube's worldwide trending chart, and a nomination at Camerimage. It also got a lot of people talking openly about their own struggles. Sometimes somebody just has to go first.
