When they first got together, Paul and Lindsay Devereux didn’t seem like the most obvious match. Paul was from Dublin, and he ticked more than a few of the stereotypical Dubliner boxes – he liked a pint and didn’t take himself too seriously, and he had a thick Dublin accent.
Lindsay was the sensible one. She was a nurse from Scotland, with a master’s degree. But they clicked.
They both loved travel and adventure, and travelled the world together, driving through the US in a campervan.
On their return, they settled down and built a home together in the mountains outside Dublin. Paul worked as a painter and decorator – until he had an aneurysm ten years ago.
He had surgery to remove a second aneurysm from his brain, leaving him with a brain injury, and severe short-term memory loss.
Now, Lindsay gets up at 5am to get to Dublin, where she works as a nurse, and on top of this she helps care for Paul.
The couple are in debt, and they don’t have much support outside immediate family.
But this year, things took a turn for the better after a documentary about the couple, made by their niece, documentary filmmaker Hannah Currie, premiered internationally and won a Bafta Scotland award for ‘best short film’.
Currie, 31, has wanted to make a film about her uncle since the injury. She worked in media, but worked on the production side, helping other people make their films.
“I always wanted to be a documentary film maker, but thought it wasn’t accessible to me as a woman, and as someone who didn’t have the confidence in her abilities,” Currie tells NR Times.
“But the urge wasn’t going away, and I decided to go back to university and do a documentary directing course, which was the first time I picked up a camera.”
After completing her Masters in Screen Documentary course, Currie successfully applied for funding from the Scottish Documentary Institute and finally got to work on the documentary she’d been wanting to film for ten years. But it was a much more difficult experience than she could’ve anticipated.
“It was a really hard film to make because there’s so much to their story,” she says. “Paul’s aneurism and the fall-out from that affected every area of their lives.”
Paul smokes and drinks, she says, and doesn’t understand why this puts his health at increased risk, given his medical history.
But his maladaptive behaviours were one of the reasons she wanted to make the film in the first place.
“Some members of my family got frustrated at Paul because he kept on drinking and smoking. They said he needed to take responsibility for his behaviour. I was curious to hear his side of the story; if you’ve gone through this and your only crutch is smoking or drinking, then why not? I was keen to explore that.”
But somewhere along the way, the film became more about Lindsay, and not just Paul.
“Paul’s not going to get better, he’ll make small improvements but he’s always going to live with his injury. But I hope my aunt will find light in the situation.”
Currie hopes her aunt can start speaking to other families going through this and help them.
“If something good can come from this, I think she’ll feel validated that her decision to stay in this situation and sacrifice her life for another person will be worth it.”
Her grant was for a short film, and Currie found it difficult to know which bits of footage to leave in.
“When I finished it, I thought it missed the mark. But when people started contacting me, especially families of people with brain injuries, saying the film had had a big impact on them and brought them a lot of comfort, I realised I was being harsh on myself.”
Devlin says she felt enormous pressure to do the film, and her family, justice, especially because the funding came from public money.
She also struggled to get a balance between handling it sensitively and making something that people would want to watch.
“When you’re making a film, you’re making a piece of entertainment. It needed to hold people’s attention long enough to get an important message across.”
Paul Devereux
The film’s title, ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore,’ references Paul’s habit of repeating jokes.
“It’s funny and bizarre to watch, then it becomes not so funny. But I wanted to do him justice, because he does talk about things other than jokes.”
She was in her early twenties when it happened, and she remembers her uncle being a ‘burst of energy’.
“He’s a great guy. He hasn’t changed. If you catch him on a day where he isn’t too fatigued or he hasn’t had a drink, you can have a conversation with him, but he’ll forget things when he gets tired.”
Hannah Currie and Paul Devereux
Currie had sleepless nights over the decisions she made when editing the film, but her uncle was ‘over the moon’ when she sent him the final cut.
“Even though it might’ve been difficult for him to watch, he needed to sign it off. I sent it to him and he said everything in it was true.”
Currie says the feedback she’s had since the film’s release has been ‘overwhelmingly positive’. It premiered at DOC NYC in New York and DOCFEED in the Netherlands, and Currie took Lindsay with her.
“She’s been suffering in silence for ten years and had to get on with it and provide. A lot of friends abandon you when this kind of thing happens, because they find it difficult to be around someone who displays this behaviour,” Currie says.
The reaction to the film is helping her learn to believe positive feedback and be more confident in her abilities.
“The first minister Nicola Surgeon tweeted about it, she probably didn’t feel the need to be nice, she probably just liked it,” Currie laughs.
“I might not be super confident, but I have empathy with my characters and I’m able to make people feel confident enough to tell me their stories,” she adds.
You can watch That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore on BBC iPlayer here.
