She seems more animated than flustered, as if packing her day with activities and to-dos is her norm. “It’s my personality. I like a mix,” Tiéche, 54, said. “I’ve always been like that.” Tiéche’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. “If I’m only directing or producing, I’ll miss just getting into that zone with editing or writing, which I’m good at. Writing is about creating something from nothing. Producing involves a lot of project managing, which I like doing too. I like putting together great teams. There’s not a lot of people who are like me.”

She 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 Tiéche’s credits. However, it’s environmental and nature content for such networks as National Geographic, PBS and Al Jazeera, where her work stands out most. On her website, she refers to herself as an “environmental filmmaker.”  

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’s about bats and women scientists who study North American bats being plagued by an infectious, deadly disease called White Nose Syndrome. 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. WNS has caused widespread declines of hibernating bat populations since 2006.

Tiéche has been working for free on The Invisible Mammal for nearly six years. Virtually all the production’s financing has come from crowd-funding campaigns and a few private donors. Principal photography was completed in 2022. She is still trying to raise money to finish the editing and to market the film. Hosting a few small house parties and fundraising events have drummed up support for the film, which she plans on releasing this year. Right now, she is in the thick of submitting the “work in progress” to film festivals, including SXSW and the SFFILM Festival.  

 Aside from the DC Comics “Batman” movie franchise, are audiences interested in bats? “You would be surprised. People love bats. They think bats are cool,” she said. “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. I looked up and the sky was just filled with bats. They were everywhere,” she said. “It was the first time I’d ever seen a bat emergence. San Francisco is not a place where bats fly around at night. Being a nature lover, I thought it was so cool. It stuck with me.”

After grad 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 Colbert and became concerned how bats were dying in North America by the millions. “My heart broke when I read that story,” she said. “I wanted to know if somebody could find a solution to this possible extinction of a species.”

Without production money, she went ahead and shot some footage at the nearest bat colony of 250,000 Mexican free-tailed bats, located on Interstate 80 near Davis. There, she met Corky Quirk, a bat tour guide and educator for the Yolo Basin Foundation and founder of NorCal Bats. Tièche gathered enough material over time to put together a 10-minute short, “The Bat Rescuer,” profiling Quirk. “I like to tell character-driven stories where audiences can really latch onto a character and go on a journey with that character,” she said. “I like to build character-driven stories like a narrative.”

“The Bat Rescuer” was released in 2016 at festivals to enthusiastic audiences and is still available to stream online.  “People loved the film. They told me that they wanted to go out and see a bat flight or to help the bats,” Tièche said. “I knew I was onto something.”

Securing some funding in 2019, she embarked on expanding the film into a 90-minute feature. She added two producers, a cinematographer, who specializes in shooting bats, and editor Heidi Zimmerman of Portland, whose style is similar to Tièche’s. She sought out Zimmerman after screening a film Zimmerman edited, Dammed to Extinction, about how four obsolete dams along the Pacific Coast are cutting off access to thousands of miles of rivers for endangered salmon and near-extinct orcas.

“I really liked the way she blended factual storytelling with nature,” Tièche said. “She brought policy and politics into the film, along with all this beautiful nature footage. That’s what I wanted to do with the bat film.”

Key sources in the The Invisible Mammal are three women scientists, including UC Santa Cruz research professor and Chief Scientist at Bat Conservation International, Winifred Frick, who (with her research team) have discovered a way to help bats combat white-nose syndrome. The project is called Operation Fat Bat. The innovative solution is to use light to lure the bats out of the caves, allowing them to feast on insects before winter hibernation. The film crew traveled to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with Frick to document the bat population and to examine the progress of the OFB mission to feed and save bats. 

Unforgettable imagery Tièche witnessed and captured while directing her first feature 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.”

Before Tièche devoted a couple of years to “The Bat Rescuer,” and another six years to The Invisible Mammal, she wrote, produced, and directed a feminist horror short (running time: 17:45 minutes) “The Spinster” which premiered in 2014. The protagonist is described as a “cycle vixen” on the film’s website. Bicycle enthusiast/activist Tièche wanted her main character to be a bike rider cruising the streets of San Francisco, who is “loved and feared.” 

In 2020, when Covid hit, it didn’t derail the progress of The Invisible Mammal. However, bats were initially being demonized as the cause of the pandemic, which was later debunked. “The world was blaming bats. It was pretty serious,” Tièche said. “We had to pivot the story and make that part of the film.”

Once the documentary is released, Tièche plans to start new projects, while continuing her regular gig of teaching editing at Diablo Valley College. “I want to write some screenplays. I couldn’t do that while making this film. It takes so much of my time,” she said. “The majority of my ideas have something to do with women and/or the environment.” 

To learn more about “The Invisible Mammal” and Kristin Tièche: The Invisible Mammal

Instagram: @theinvisiblemammal @ktieche

The Spinster Movie