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. “It’s my personality. 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. “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 projects managing, which I like doing, too. I like putting together great teams. There’s not a lot of people who are like me.”

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 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. 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.

Leading up to the world premiere, Tièche admitted she has been overwhelmed. Yes, she’s excited, but she’s still trying to raise $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. “Even though we have a team of volunteer producers, others have to be paid. I should be paid.”

During the six years Tièche has worked on, “The Invisible Mammal,” she has been working for free. Virtually all the production’s financing has come from crowd-funding campaigns and a few private donors. Principle photography was completed in 2022.

Tièche revealed she’s been in physical pain and has been mentally depleted in the final laps of finishing her first feature-length film. “It’s so stressful. Everything falls on my shoulders,” she said. “People always ask me what my next project is. It will be to heal.”

She is confident the film will be audience-ready a week before its May 3 world premiere. 

“The Invisible Mammal” follows three women scientists, UC Santa Cruz researcher/chief Scientist of Bat Conservation International Dr. Winifred Frick, founder of NorCal Bats Corky Quirk of 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 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.

Tiéche expects the doc be in other film festival lineups. The producers, led by Matthew Podolsky and Holly Mosher, are also in talks with streaming platforms for distribution.

“We’ve been invited to other festivals. We are also planning community and educational screenings, where we can connect with our target audience, like women in science and wildlife organizations,” Tièche said. “This story is relevant to them.”

“The Invisible Mammal” has had work-in-progress (aka rough cut) screenings along the way. It’s been a valuable way for Tièche to get feedback on how to make the film better. There were two such screenings in early December, after which Tièche took over the final edits from Heidi Zimmerman shaved 10 minutes. “I spend the holidays holed up in the editing room. We took the ax to some of our darlings, but it’s a tight 89 minutes now,” she said.

The feedback compelled her to thin out some dialogue, “so audiences can just experience and feel, rather than being told,” she said.

Based on consistent audience reaction, Tièche also shifted the film toward Quirk, making her a main character. “Everybody loves Corky. She is so awesome,” she said. “Everybody relates to different characters in the film for different reasons. But everyone said they love Corky’s story.”

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’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.”

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 Kolbert 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 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.”

In 2020, when Covid-19 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. 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 shooting bats, and editor 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.”

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 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.”

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.

As a bicycle enthusiast and activist, Tièche wanted her lead character to be a bike rider cruising the streets of San Francisco, who is both “loved and feared.”

Once the documentary has its run, 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.”

“The Invisible Mammal,” has its world premiere at 12 p.m., May 3, at the DocLands Documentary Film Festival (April 30-May 4) at the Smith Rafael Film Center, 1118 Fourth St., San Rafael. Special guests include director/writer/producer Tièche, Dr. Winifred Frick, and Corky Quirk (who might bring “education bats”).

•  DocLands.com

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• YouTube: @californiafilminstitute

• www.theinvisiblemammal.com

• Instagram: @theinvisiblemammal @ktieche

• www.thespinstermovie.com