One warm summer evening, while having dinner outside the Inn Complete, one of her favorite haunts as a graduate film student at Syracuse University in upstate New York, Kristin Tièche saw something fly by her. Looking up, to her surprise, the sky was filled with bats.

“I had never seen such a sight, and I thought it was just so cool to sit out and watch wildlife at work,” she said.

Around a decade later, in 2009, it would all come rushing back when she read an article in the New Yorker by environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert that detailed how North American bats were in trouble. A fungal disease called white-nose syndrome was killing them by the millions.

“The first place that it was detected was in upstate New York,” she said. “I immediately thought about those bats that I saw when I was sitting out at the Inn Complete, and I was wondering, are they still there? Can students still go out and see them? I had this emotional reaction to the story and then thought that this would be an interesting story to follow.”

Her journey looking into bats, their struggle to survive and the people who work to help them led her to make “The Invisible Mammal,” the award-winning filmmaker’s first feature documentary. The film, which highlights a team of female biologists and their work to save bats from white-nose syndrome, will make its world premiere at DocLands at noon Saturday at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. The documentary film festival runs through Sunday.

The screening will be followed by a discussion with Tièche, producer Matthew Podolsky, editor Heidi Zimmerman and film subjects Alice Chung-MacCoubrey, of the National Park Service, Winifred Frick, of Bat Conservation International, and bat rescuer and educator Corky Quirk, who will bring bats for people to see. (She has a permit through the state of California to bring them to schools, libraries and events for educational purposes.)

Admission is $9 to $18.50. More information at doclands.com/film/the-invisible-mammal.

“It means a lot to me to be able to share my film with my community,” said Tièche, who grew up in Mill Valley and graduated from Tamalpais High School in 1988. “We feel that ‘The Invisible Mammal’ will be a great way for the community to learn about how amazing bats are and that there’s no reason to fear them.”

It didn’t take Tièche, now a San Francisco resident, long to realize that bats were misunderstood. In fact, in pop culture, they’re often associated with vampires.

During screenings of her 2016 short film “The Bat Rescuer,” a reflection of Quirk’s work with bats, she would see how people were initially skeptical about the subject matter. By the end, their “whole attitude had changed,” she said.

“When I started filming with Corky, she would talk a lot about how we fear what we don’t understand. And the other scientists in ‘The Invisible Mammal’ mentioned that people are afraid of bats because they don’t see them.

“They do all of their amazing work at night,” Tièche said.

“Bats are part of our shared ecosystem. I hope that people will walk away with an understanding about all the amazing things they do to help us live on a healthy planet.”

Finding her purpose

Growing up in Mill Valley, Tièche always loved how Marin came alive during the Mill Valley Film Festival each fall.

“The Mill Valley Film Festival was a huge influence on me in terms of my decision to go to film school,” she said. “I would get to see these films from around the world that I would never get a chance to see anywhere else,” said Tièche, who worked at the now-closed Sausalito movie theater during high school.

After studying history and French literature at the University of California at San Diego, she taught French for two years before “soul searching” and finding her way back to film, heading to Syracuse University for her master’s degree. While there, she received awards from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for her work in screenwriting and sound design.

‘Wasn’t just a film about bats’

When she began working on the film in 2019, and went up to Michigan’s upper peninsula to document the pilot project of Operation Fat Bat, led by Frick, she quickly learned that it “wasn’t just a film about bats.”

“When I flew over there to film with them, it wasn’t until the first day of filming that I realized that they had a team of all-female scientists. Instantly, I was like, this isn’t just a film about bats, and it’s not just a film about bat conservation. It’s a film about female biologists and women in science. My hope too is that this film ends up being an inspiration to younger women who are considering a career in science,” Tièche said.

And she also hopes the film inspires people to become bat advocates.

“The look of awe and wonder on people’s faces in those opening and closing scenes is real,” said Tièche of the scenes of Mexican free-tailed bats emerging from the Bracken Cave in Texas. “I still tell people today that the bat emergence at Bracken Cave, that’s probably the No. 1 wildlife experience that I’ve ever had in my life.”