Across cultural and political barriers, environmental challenges with no simple solutions range from silently lurking epidemics to those more readily apparent. The documentary “Inventing Tomorrow,” chronicles six teenagers who not only seek to find answers to a mere handful of these types of problems for themselves overnight, but also aim to cast an international spotlight on those struggles that affect their neighborhoods.

With their eyes cast on the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, described in the film as the “Olympics of high school fairs,” the teens and their four collective projects from their respective countries start from the beginning and work all the way out to the awards ceremony and beyond.

As a globetrotting exploration at the lives of young minds, filmed by different crews during roughly the same time span, the viewer starts to get their bearings with Indonesia's Shofi Latifa Nuha Anfaresi and Intan Utami Putri. The pair of 16-year-old girls look to their backyard to better understand the effects of the tin sea sand. Anfaresi and Putri live on the world's second largest source of tin ore, where there is both legal and illegal mining, which negatively impacts the sea life and ecosystems.

The audience is then shown three other projects at their beginning stages, all differing in size and scope. Jared Goodwin, a 15-year-old boy in Hilo, Hawaii, explains that his love for his homeland comes from his admiration of nature photography as he examines aviary life from afar. This passion leads him to examine the contamination of a pond, where his grandmother brought him in his younger years, and the site of dispersed debris that were picked up from the body of water after two tsunamis. Goodwin doesn't seek a solution to remove the microscopic arsenic but to make officials aware of the problem for more appropriate land use zoning to lead to better safety measures.

Like Goodwin, India's Sahithi Pingali is another solo scientist with a similar project. Her project encompasses a process to use smartphones and their accessories to gather data through crowdsourcing about water pollution in her hometown of Bangalore, with hopes of stopping the dumping raw sewage into the watershed. One of the most standout images of the film is seeing the amount of bubbles that pollute the river, which makes it through the Indian streets like tumbleweeds in the American West.

Lastly, we meet a trio of teenage boys from Monterrey, Mexico, one of the most polluted Latin American cities Fernando Villalobos, Jesus Aranada and Jose Esparaza, who are on the cusp of graduating high school, and are looking to use photocatalytic ceramic paint to purify the air and curb global warming. The filmmakers leave the cameras rolling to depict the time when the three boys aren't busy working on their project, such as working during off-hours at a catering company and dinner time with their families.

Documentarian Laura Nix takes a hands-off approach to telling the stories of these young minds on their quest to present their projects to their peers and judges, who aren't shy about throwing hard-hitting questions. Between the shots of putting together their projects, Nix keeps in the mundane aspects, and possibly embarrassing moments, such as a small quibble between Goodwin and his mother when rehearsing his presentation, or the young scientists rehearsing English phrases to recite to someone for a photo opportunity with one of their ISEF peers, or when Pingali shows her friend the effects of pollution on a river by throwing a rock into it. Somehow, she makes the camera and crew behind it invisible for each of her subjects to shine to the viewer.

Nix doesn't use the documentary talking heads trope, which can give useful insight into the young scientists' thoughts throughout the process, but instead we are given an intimate look at the teenagers' interaction with their teachers, parents and peers to prepare for the international competition.

After all the studying and preparing, it culminates in the ISEF competition, showing how much pressure they go through from their peers and judges. It's an even greater feat when the audience realizes their scores will also reflect their nervousness while under the microscope of their judges and the documentary's camera.

Once the spectacle of Los Angeles is gone, the teenagers return to their home countries and the audience is left with the question of, “What now?” Nix continues to follow each of the students in their endeavors, whether it is pursuing secondary education, or keeping up on the hours of work they put in to their projects.

The film doesn't try to act as an activist to the problems these teenagers are exploring. Rather, it celebrates the spirit of research and problem solving that lies within them. When cutting between all their stories, up to the point where a few meet at the international competition, the viewer can recognize that, though they are separated geographically, they share the same spark of problem-solving through science, a language found throughout the world.

During the Port Townsend Film Festival, local students will attend the screening at 9:30 p.m. Sept. 21