By Noma Faingold

Kristen Tièche walks into Le Café du Soleil, a French bistro in the Lower Haight, clutching her dog, Zizou. She rode her bike from her Inner Richmond home. It is mid-afternoon. As she places a glass of white wine, accompanied by a glass of water, at a window table, she mentions that her day is tighter than she realized, having already spent time at a volunteer garden, followed by a shower.

“I have people coming over to my place at 5:30,” she said.

She seems more animated than flustered, as if packing her day with activities and to-dos is her norm.

“I like a mix,” Tièche, 54, said. “I’ve always been like that.”

Tièche’s career as a filmmaker reflects a diverse set of skills, roles and interests. The San Francisco native, who grew up in Mill Valley, excels at editing, producing, directing, writing and teaching.

“I’ll never be satisfied doing just one thing,” she said.

For nearly six years, her passion project has been a full-length documentary titled, “The Invisible Mammal,” which she wrote, directed and co-produced. It is finally getting its world premiere on May 3, at the Smith Rafael Film Center, during the annual DocLands Documentary Film Festival (April 30-May 4).

Tièche’s documentary is about bats and women scientists who study North American bats being plagued by an infectious, deadly disease called White Nose Syndrome (WNS). The Pseudogymnoascus Destructans (PD) fungus is found in the damp caves and mines where bats hibernate. Once WNS infects a bat, it becomes an irritant around their noses and ears, repeatedly interrupting their sleep, which leads to the bats burning their fat storage and starving to death. Since 2006, WNS has caused widespread declines of hibernating bat populations.

Leading up to the world premiere, Tièche admitted she has been overwhelmed. She has needed to raise an additional $13,000 to put the finishing touches on the film, including working with a sound designer and colorist.

“The pressure has been on in the last three months. I’ve been burning the candle at both ends,” she said.

During the six years Tièche has worked on “The Invisible Mammal,” she has worked for free. Virtually all the production’s financing has come from crowd-funding campaigns and a few private donors.

Tièche revealed she has been in physical pain and mentally depleted in the final laps of finishing her first feature-length film.

“It’s so stressful,” she said. “People always ask me what my next project is. It will be to heal.”

“The Invisible Mammal” follows three women scientists, University of California (UC), Santa Cruz researcher/chief scientist of Bat Conservation International Dr. Winifred Frick, founder of NorCal Bats Corky Quirk of UC Davis and Dr. Alice Chung-MacCoubrey of the National Park Service, as they strive to protect North American bats against the deadly disease.

Frick and her research team discovered a way to help bats combat WNS. The project is called Operation Fat Bat (OFB). The innovative solution is to use light to lure the bats out of the caves, allowing them to feast on insects before winter hibernation.

Tièche expects the documentary to be featured in other film festivals. The producers, led by Matthew Podolsky and Holly Mosher, are also in talks with streaming platforms for distribution.

“We are planning community and educational screenings, where we can connect with our target audience, like women in science and wildlife organizations,” she said.

Tièche has her own production company called Selvavision. For many years she has secured steady work producing, directing and editing video content for corporate, startup, education and non-profit clients, including Sephora, PayPal, NHK Japan and Sustainable Future Outdoor Academy.

As a freelance editor, she has worked on a wide variety of unscripted and non-fiction programming for broadcast, cable, festival and theatrical release. Genres include true crime, reality, lifestyle and history. “Judgement with Ashleigh Banfield” and “Someone They Knew with Tamron Hall” for Court TV and “Eye on the Bay” for KPIX (CBS Bay Area affiliate) are among Tièche’s credits. However, it is environmental and nature content for such networks as National Geographic, PBS and Al Jazeera, where her work stands out most.

But, aside from the DC Comics “Batman” movie franchise, are audiences interested in bats?

“You would be surprised. People love bats,” she said. “They think bats are cool. They’ve been waiting for a bat doc.”

Tièche’s fascination with bats started more than 25 years ago, while she was earning a Master of Arts degree in TV-Radio-Film at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. One summer evening, she was having some beers with classmates on the terrace of a campus pub.

“All of a sudden, I thought I saw something fly by my head,” she said. “I looked up and the sky was just filled with bats. They were everywhere. Being a nature lover, I thought it was so cool. It stuck with me.”

After graduate school and a two-year stint with the Teach for America program in Mississippi, Tièche returned to San Francisco, which had a thriving documentary community at the time. But soon she moved to Los Angeles because she needed to make some serious money to pay off her student loan debt.

“There is an industry here, but it’s not Hollywood,” she said.

Three years later (2006), she returned to San Francisco. Between work assignments, Tièche started researching bats. She first learned about WNS from a 2009 New Yorker article by environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert and became concerned about how bats were dying in North America by the millions.

“I wanted to know if somebody could find a solution to this possible extinction of a species,” she said.

Without production money, she went ahead and shot some footage at the nearest bat colony of 250,000 Mexican free-tailed bats, located on I-80 near Davis. There she met Quirk, a bat tour guide and educator for the Yolo Basin Foundation and founder of NorCal Bats.

“The Bat Rescuer” was released in 2016 at festivals to enthusiastic audiences and is still available to stream online.

“People loved the film,” Tièche said. “I knew I was onto something.”

In 2020, when COVID-19 initially hit, it did not derail the progress of “The Invisible Mammal.” However, bats were initially being demonized as the cause of the pandemic, which was later debunked. In fact, it was discovered through research that bats’ super-immunity could help prevent another global pandemic.

“The world was blaming bats. It was pretty serious,” Tièche said. “We had to pivot the story and make that part of the film.”

Securing some funding in 2019, she embarked on expanding the film feature length. She added two producers, a cinematographer, who specializes in filming bats, and editor Zimmerman of Portland, whose style is similar to Tièche’s. The film crew traveled with Frick to Michigan to document the bat population and to examine the progress of OFB’s mission to feed and save bats.

Unforgettable imagery Tièche witnessed and captured as director occurred on location at Bracken Cave, on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas, home of the largest known bat colony in the world (20 million Mexican free-tailed bats).

“You sit outside the cave on a ridge. When they come out, they do this thing called the ‘Batnato.’ It’s this vortex,” she said. “It’s the most incredible wildlife experience I have ever seen.”

Once the documentary has its run, Tièche plans to start new projects, while continuing her regular gig of teaching editing at Diablo Valley College.

“The Invisible Mammal,” has its world premiere at noon, May 3, at the DocLands Documentary Film Festival (April 30-May 4) at the Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. DocLands.com. Instagram: @doclandsfilmfestival. Facebook: @doclandsdocumentaryfilmfestival. YouTube: @californiafilminstitute, theinvisiblemammal.com., Instagram: @theinvisiblemammal, @ktieche, thespinstermovie.com.