Good Enough Ancestor: Release Roundtable

Good Enough Ancestor tells the story of Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first Digital Minister and the world’s first transgender minister, and how she took Taiwan from an occupation of their national legislature to a beacon of digital democracy. 

Filmed over ten days in the lead up to Taiwan’s historic 2024 elections, the poetic documentary threads together Tang’s reflections on her own life—overcoming bullying, a life-threatening heart condition, and gender dysphoria—with the story of Taiwan’s evolution from martial law to its most recent election. Against the backdrop of rising authoritarianism and geopolitical tensions, Good Enough Ancestor is a timely reminder of the fragility of democracy and the responsibility to tend to it for future generations. 

To mark the film’s public release, Tang reconvened with director Cynthia Wade, editor Sasha Friedlander, and cinematographer Boaz “Bo” Freund for a special Combinations roundtable. They spoke about finding “uncommon ground” within the crew, revitalizing democracy, and why they’ve opted to relinquish copyright for all of their footage.

Cynthia Wade: Audrey Tang, I’m so glad to see you again, a literal genius and up at midnight. Is it midnight there?

Audrey Tang: Yes, it’s 1:30 AM.

CW: Thank you so much for being up to have this conversation with us. We really appreciate it. So Audrey, I was fortunate enough to be invited by you and Glen Weyl to capture Taiwan during its historic 2024 election, knowing that we were rolling into this incredible year when 70 countries were holding elections.

Our goal was to gather footage for a feature-length documentary or a biopic about you at some point, which I think may still happen. But in the short term, we realized that 2024 was such an unusual and important year that we should make a short documentary now. Let’s talk about how that came together.

AT: Well, in 2024, as you mentioned, the majority of the world’s democracies were going to have elections and Taiwan was first in line. Throughout the year, democracies have faced the same information attacks, cyber attacks, and polarization attacks that Taiwan has endured for the past 12 years. Some fared relatively well, although there was no democracy that did not have the incumbent losing votes. But some of them, Romania for example, did have major election issues that annulled the entire process because of the attacks that we mentioned.

The initial idea was to present Taiwan’s experience as a tale that raises awareness in people going to vote and planning elections. We wanted to show a different model where instead of censoring or taking away voices, we can add more bridging voices and bring more people together instead of driving them apart. I call this “prosocial media,” as opposed to antisocial media. One of the initial intuitions was to capture that idea of a social media that can be prosocial.

CW: We were there for about ten days with a combination of Taiwanese and American crew members. Was there anything that stuck out to you or surprised you when you were working with us as a crew?

AT: I think of the amount of uncommon ground that we have. I remember filming at this Daoist temple, and people all have different memories around not just Daoism, but spirituality and the role it plays in civic life. This became an instant bonding point. It turns out that both of our peoples are highly religious, people just don’t talk about it in their professional lives. The film describes how, because of my heart condition, the way I live with Daoism is not as a “Religion”-religion but as a survival skill. I think that brought a very authentic conversation from everybody.

CW: Bo, when I approached you as a cinematographer, you had the idea of shooting on anamorphic lenses. I’d love for you to talk about why and what they are.

Boaz Freund: Anamorphic lenses have a much wider field of view and aspect ratio that allows you to fill the frame with a larger perspective than regular spherical lenses. We knew that Taiwan is famous for the variety of landscapes that it offers across a small island and wanted to capture that, just to give the film more of an epic feeling.

We used Hawk ’74 lenses, which are very soft and imperfect. I think the reason the manufacturer makes them like that is so that you have to figure things out at the moment. It was quite a feat from a visual standpoint.

CW: And did you have a favourite scene to shoot?

BF: A memorable day for me was when we went up into the mountains in July and shot in the cabin with Audrey, where you spent all of this important time in isolation during your adolescence.

There was one particular moment at the end of the shoot. We were on this tight schedule and you had to go, Audrey. But then we saw this beautiful vista. We set up a frame and we were like, “Oh, just go there and just look out towards the ridge.”

I had Cynthia breathing over me, “She has to go, she has to go.” And I’m waiting and saying, “Just one moment.” Then the clouds cleared and the sun came into place. It was the most beautiful visual metaphor. In the footage, you can hear me saying, “Okay, you can go now.” We held the frame and you just jumped into a car and left. I didn’t see you for the rest of the day. It was a perfect moment where the gods of cinematography shined on us.

CW: And then Sasha, you and I worked for five years on the film Grit in Indonesia, where you were a journalist. There’s such a lyricism and intellectual rigour to Grit that I felt like you would be the perfect editor for Good Enough Ancestor. So I was so grateful that you were available to edit this.

We’ve got these beautiful vérité moments that Bo captured, but we’re also telling a story in the past. And of course, as storytellers, you want to put the past as much in the present as possible. How did you structure this?

Sasha Friedlander: I think your interview, Audrey, was four and a half hours, and we had to whittle that down to 20 minutes. It was a huge undertaking to compress the historical context, particularly for a Western audience who we have to assume doesn’t know any of this stuff.

So that was daunting, but your interview was fantastic. Something that stuck with me from the beginning was the fragility of democracy in Taiwan, but also the coexistence of strength and resilience, something that you feel within yourself as well. From the beginning, the goal was to embody that over the course of the film. 

I think where we did that very successfully was playing with pacing. Throughout the film, we have a lot of moments where things are picking up, and you’re moving and change is happening, and then we go back to that place where you’re grounded, where you can calm yourself, in part because of your health condition, but also because it seems that you’ve found that that helps in the process of change and transformation. I like how that plays out in the edit.

CW: It’s always the goal of a filmmaker to take an issue and tell it through a personal story. The more that you can embed the political within the personal, the more you can bring the audience along on a journey. Sasha, you really accomplished that in what we get from the trajectory of Audrey’s life. As we’re seeing that trajectory, we’re seeing democracy coming to Taiwan, the birth of the internet, how social media and digital democracy and technology are being used. Audrey, can you talk more about what digital democracy is and what pluralism is?

AT: In Taiwan, we have this idea of Plurality. While Singularity is about technology accelerating an extreme to the point where it dominates an entire society, Plurality is about a diffusion of diverse viewpoints. Through technology, we have a way to discover our uncommon ground so that even though we come from different places, different generations, different ethnicities, different religions, there’s a systemic way to co-create policies, shared norms, and things like that.

The heart keeps beating even though there is existential uncertainty every night, which is a part of the film. I think that captures the Taiwanese view on democracy. For every incoming harm, we need to double down on democracy in order to overcome it and not to dial back on the degree of freedom that we enjoy.

CW: You relinquish copyright so that future creators can remix whatever you produce. That was the agreement with us, that ultimately whatever we filmed would be available for creators in the future. 

AT: I already have at least one filmmaker who has reached out to ask for a copy of that hard disk. I’m like, “Yes, but I’m also uploading it to the cloud.” Perfection forecloses future creativity. But if we just say, okay, these 21 minutes of footage are a reference, an initial stab at one way to view things, then it’s an invitation. Whatever omissions or issues people find, we can invite them to become demonstrators and say, “Here is the footage. Go and make something better.”

CW: Sasha, do you have a favourite scene?

SF: I do really love that transition from martial law coming to an end and then going to the cabin. I think that would have to be my favourite section.

CW: Yeah, I loved being at that cabin. Bo, I remember very close to the election, we were out on the street in Taipei, and you got that beautiful image of a woman in the car looking up with all of these reflections. That was one of my favourite visual shots.

BF: Yes, it was a very special night to be out. I think I had a little bit of a resurgence of hope. I also had a really great conversation with Audrey while we were waiting for a cab the day before. We spoke about AI and where that’s going. I was very, very worried about the state of the world and AI, and Audrey, you gave me some peace of mind that I take with me. I remind myself of that conversation a lot. I think there is a lot to worry about but there’s a lot to be happy for. Hopefully we don’t mess it up.

AT: That cut with the woman looking out from the car was also used in the trailer. I played the trailer for the audience at the Seattle Arts & Lectures where I had a conversation with Ted Chiang. I also played the trailer during a conversation with Laura Loomer on her show with 60,000 live viewers. I would say that these two audiences do not overlap a lot, to put it diplomatically, but both crowds were equally mesmerised. They all applauded the film’s outlook of hope and optimism despite the intense existential threat that we were facing.

CW: The message continues connecting these very disparate audiences, which are actually not so disparate. I’m glad this 21-minute film has been able to get out there. Audrey, do you have any final comments or thoughts?

AT: I am deeply thankful. This is not about me, but about a moment in time where democracy feels like it could be an experiment that has run its course or an experiment that’s just about to have a revitalization. At the Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda), we always say that we’re the little motor because mòda means motor here in Taiwan. We make sure that people feel that there is this quiet but still running drive to free the future together. I think this film and the material it carries are very much part of this revitalization of democracy around the world. So I truly cherish this work with you, and I look forward to seeing more adaptations, more remakes.