Alan Berliner spent years trying to get his father to talk about his life. His father spent the same years explaining, with considerable patience and occasional irritation, why this seemed to him a waste of time. The result is a film showing what empathy runs up against.

Most documentaries about family history are structured around recovery — the gradual uncovering of what was hidden, the slow opening of a reluctant subject, the emotional payoff of understanding finally reached. Nobody's Business refuses that structure, and the refusal is the point. Oscar Berliner, the filmmaker's father, does not gradually warm to the project. He is not secretly grateful for his son's persistence. He finds the whole enterprise puzzling and says so, directly and repeatedly: why does any of this matter? What difference does it make where his parents came from, what happened to his marriages, what he felt about his own life? He is alive, he is here, the past is past. His son's need to excavate and document and understand strikes him as a peculiarity he is willing to indulge up to a point, but not beyond it.

What makes the film extraordinary is that Berliner doesn't edit this resistance away. He builds the film around it — intercutting his father's deflections with archival photographs, home movies, genealogical records, the apparatus of family memory that Oscar has no particular interest in. The film becomes a kind of argument between two different relationships to the past: the son who believes that understanding where you come from is essential to knowing who you are, and the father who has constructed a perfectly functional life on the basis of no such belief. Neither position is discredited. Oscar Berliner is not shown as blocked or damaged by his reluctance to reflect. He is shown as a particular kind of person — pragmatic, present-tense, genuinely unbothered by the questions that obsess his son — and the film extends to him, in its structure if not always in its tone, a kind of bewildered respect.

This makes Nobody's Business one of the most precise films in this collection about the limits of empathetic listening. Berliner wants to understand his father on his own terms — to enter his experience, to recover the story beneath the surface. His father keeps pointing out, with some justice, that there may be no story beneath the surface, or none that requires telling. The gap between them is a genuine difference in how people understand what a life is for and what it owes to those who come after it.

What the film arrives at, without quite stating it, is something others circle from different directions: that the desire to understand another person is always also a desire to be understood, and that these two desires are not always compatible.