Ever since Michael Powell's little-seen but widely influential 1960 film Peeping Tom, home movies have often been associated with voyeurism and violence, but for filmmaker Alan Berliner, they represent something much more ordinary and poignant, a family's endlessly revealing attempt to shape its history. Berliner carefully assembled 1986's The Family Album from anonymous 16mm footage found at flea markets and yard sales, then added bits of audio recorded from the '20s to the '50s. The resulting collage spans the entire course of American life, from infancy to old age, an experiment that draws striking parallels between how different families choose to present themselves for the camera's eye. But the potential of Berliner's technique wasn't fully realized until he turned his attention to his own family. Intimate Stranger (1991) investigates the double-life of his maternal grandfather, Joseph Cassuto, an Egyptian Jew who opened up a successful cotton trade in Japan and arguably grew more attached to its culture and people than to his wife and children back in the states. As Cassuto's biography unfolds through old photographs, home movies, and archival footage, relatives and business associates debate his virtues and come to radically different conclusions. With startling psychological insight, Berliner exposes a sore area that still profoundly affects his family two generations later. But as accomplished as Intimate Stranger is, it only hints at the overwhelming impact of the 1996 masterpiece Nobody's Business, Berliner's incredibly candid one-on-one with his cantankerous father, Oscar. By turns funny, painful, and unexpectedly moving, the film begins over Oscar's angry protestations that no one will find his "ordinary life" the least bit interesting, then sets out to prove him wrong. Father and son, each determined to unnerve the other, directly confront the sort of personal issues that would normally go untouched, including a divorce from which Oscar, 25 years later, has never really recovered. In Nobody's Business, the persistent question that connects all three documentaries—what is inherited within a family?—draws its clearest and most penetrating answers.