On July 31, 2024 6:30pm at Vivienne Culinary Books in Portland, OR, you are invited to a sneak peak of exclusive work-in-progress scenes from the forthcoming documentary The Invisible Mammal. Meet and mingle with the film’s director, Kristin Tièche, editor, Heidi Zimmerman, and producers Windy Borman and Eileen Kim. Light hors d’oeuvres will be served and wine will be available to purchase (with a percentage of sales donated to the film). A Q&A session with the filmmakers will follow the preview screening.
Tickets are available via eventbrite here – a donation of any amount serves as the entry fee.
The Invisible Mammal is a feature-length documentary which tells the story about North American bats, their struggle to survive, and the humans who help them. The film, directed by San Francisco based filmmaker Kristin Tièche, produced by Matthew Podolsky (Sea of Shadows) and Holly Mosher (Vanishing of the Bees), and edited by Heidi Zimmerman (Black Barbie) follows leading bat researchers into underground habitats as they work to save rapidly disappearing species. The film’s cast of women scientists, including Dr. Winifred Frick, Chief Scientist of Bat Conservation International, create pioneering solutions on the frontlines of a crucial race against time to save North American bats from extinction. Bat populations in North America are threatened by white-nose syndrome, a fungal pathogen that has caused catastrophic declines of bats and continues to spread across the continent. The team behind The Invisible Mammal set out to document efforts to save bat populations from white-nose syndrome, but when the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world in 2020, a shift in strategy was required. The scope of the film’s story was expanded to include the connection between bats and COVID, and how research on bats’ super-immunity could help prevent the next pandemic.
Production on The Invisible Mammal began in 2019, and the filmmaking team is extremely excited to have entered the post-production stage. Earlier this year, the team received a generous $25,000 contribution, allowing work to begin with the talented Portland-based editor, Heidi Zimmerman, on the film’s rough cut. Attendees to the Portland benefit will be the first people outside of the team to view these work-in-progress scenes from the film.
