What Lies Inside

Luke A. Renner is an award-winning director and native Hoosier.

In some ways the cliché, Luke began his storytelling journey as a young boy, making videos with his father's VHS camera, eventually producing a rather shoddy piece of work that loosely resembled a feature-length narrative, thus whetting Luke's appetite for more.

His first "real" film—a no-budget short, shot on leftover Super16mm—would debut to an extremely limited but enthusiastic crowd of friends and family when he was in college.

Upon graduating Anderson University in 1998, Luke began his career in television, first editing, then directing live, long-form, multi-camera music videos for Indiana's own, Bill and Gloria Gaither. This career-making opportunity would send Luke on a great many adventures around the globe until, in 2009, he would move with his wife and three of their children to Haiti with the dream of opening a film school that would afford a handful of people the opportunity to learn the craft that Luke had grown to love.

As fate would have it, on January 12, 2010, Haiti's cataclysmic earthquake triggered a series of events that would eventually require Luke to forfeit his plans for the film school and return to Indiana to heal from PTSD. Shortly thereafter, Luke committed himself to the task of making his first, feature-length documentary—What Lies Inside—chronicling his unexpected and unpredictable journey toward wellness from a lifetime of hidden trauma.