McGinty's Ascent Productions
SHEILA GAIL O'ROURKE, MFA, PhD
Filmmaker | Visual Anthropologist | Documentary Artist
My documentaries examine California landscapes, human-animal relations, environmental crisis, community life, and the ethical consequences of development and resource extraction. My work combines ethnographic research, observational filmmaking, public humanities, and sustained attention to place. Across films including Dry Wells of the Paso Basin, Jetty Cats, and Bombay Beach Soiree, I document communities and ecologies under pressure while foregrounding the forms of care, conflict, and survival that emerge at the edges of public attention.
I am drawn to places where the surface appears vibrant while the underlying structure is fragile: lush vineyards beside dry wells, feral cats surviving in seaside resort landscapes, and artists creating community on the shores of a dying inland sea. These are communities living with environmental and economic precarity, where beauty does not obscure danger but reveals it. My films look closely at what development, neglect, and extraction leave behind, while honoring the relationships and acts of endurance that persist in their wake.
I hold a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. My films and videos have screened internationally at festivals, academic venues, and public platforms.
My documentaries examine California landscapes, human-animal relations, environmental crisis, community life, and the ethical consequences of development and resource extraction. My work combines ethnographic research, observational filmmaking, public humanities, and sustained attention to place. Across films including Dry Wells of the Paso Basin, Jetty Cats, and Bombay Beach Soiree, I document communities and ecologies under pressure while foregrounding the forms of care, conflict, and survival that emerge at the edges of public attention.
I am drawn to places where the surface appears vibrant while the underlying structure is fragile: lush vineyards beside dry wells, feral cats surviving in seaside resort landscapes, and artists creating community on the shores of a dying inland sea. These are communities living with environmental and economic precarity, where beauty does not obscure danger but reveals it. My films look closely at what development, neglect, and extraction leave behind, while honoring the relationships and acts of endurance that persist in their wake.
I hold a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. My films and videos have screened internationally at festivals, academic venues, and public platforms.
CURRENT PROJECT
Who Governs the Aquifer?
Local Power and California’s Groundwater Crisis
What happens to “sustainability” when the agencies managing an overdrafted aquifer are led by those most empowered to extract it?
Why now: California’s Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) is moving from plans to enforcement; today’s groundwater sustainability agency (GSA) decisions will set the terms for farms, rural households, tribal communities, ecosystems, and towns for decades.
Who Governs the Aquifer? is a documentary and research project that expands the local focus of Dry Wells of the Paso Basin: A Tragedy of the Commons into a statewide investigation of groundwater democracy in California. The film examines groundwater sustainability agencies and the politics of representation in the management of overdrafted aquifers.
Under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014, more than 200 local agencies now determine how the overdrafted aquifers in their care will be measured, allocated, conserved, and restricted. These decisions will shape the future of rural households, farms, tribal communities, ecosystems, and towns across the state.
The project compares agencies with different governance structures: those dominated by large agricultural landowners, water districts, developers, and other local elites; those that include small farmers, domestic well users, working people, environmental advocates, and Indigenous communities; and those responsible for primarily urban, mixed-use, or non‑agricultural groundwater basins. Through public records research, interviews, meeting observation, and documentary filming, the project asks how governance structures shape whose water is protected, whose losses are normalized, and whose claims become part of the public record.
Visually, the project moves between meeting rooms, public records, dry domestic wells, irrigation infrastructure, and everyday life in communities whose futures depend on groundwater decisions—bringing institutional process into contact with lived experience.
Under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014, more than 200 local agencies now determine how the overdrafted aquifers in their care will be measured, allocated, conserved, and restricted. These decisions will shape the future of rural households, farms, tribal communities, ecosystems, and towns across the state.
The project compares agencies with different governance structures: those dominated by large agricultural landowners, water districts, developers, and other local elites; those that include small farmers, domestic well users, working people, environmental advocates, and Indigenous communities; and those responsible for primarily urban, mixed-use, or non‑agricultural groundwater basins. Through public records research, interviews, meeting observation, and documentary filming, the project asks how governance structures shape whose water is protected, whose losses are normalized, and whose claims become part of the public record.
Visually, the project moves between meeting rooms, public records, dry domestic wells, irrigation infrastructure, and everyday life in communities whose futures depend on groundwater decisions—bringing institutional process into contact with lived experience.
DRY WELLS OF THE PASO BASIN: A TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS 2024
A feature documentary that investigates groundwater depletion, agricultural power, rural vulnerability, and environmental governance in California's Paso Robles basin. Combining ethnographic research and documentary storytelling, the film reveals how aquifer overdraft reshapes communities, landscapes, and the meaning of sustainability.
A tragedy of the commons occurs when an individual or group uses more than their share of a publicly owned resource for their self-interest, which leads to the depletion of the resource for the entire community. (William Foster Lloyd, 1833; Garret Hardin, 1968)
__________________________
Beginning in the 1990s, agricultural corporations and investors began buying thousands of acres of land with water rights in the county’s pastoral wine country. They planted new vineyards and drilled dozens of 800-foot-deep wells, pumping water from the Paso Basin into vast irrigation ponds. As vineyard expansion, population growth, and climate change intensified pressure on the aquifer, 200- to 400-foot wells that had long sustained homes, small farms, and ranches began to run dry.
For small landowners, a dry well is both an environmental crisis and an economic trap. Drilling deeper can cost $80,000, yet without water, land often loses the collateral value needed to finance a new well. The film follows three small landowners whose livelihoods, property, and hopes for the future have been threatened by the collapse of their water access. Through intimate observation and attention to local political struggle, the documentary examines how ordinary residents confront the corporate, environmental, and governmental forces reshaping access to the Paso Basin.
Scenes of dry taps, empty holding tanks, vineyard irrigation ponds evaporating in the sun, county meetings, and everyday acts of endurance reveal water not as an abstract resource, but as the condition of domestic life, land value, and political voice. At its center, the film asks what happens when those with the least power to deplete an aquifer bear the greatest burden of its over-draft.
TRAILER: https://vimeo.com/1008664313
DRY WELLS IS AVAILABLE TO VIEW ON:
The Cinema Verde Environmental Film and Arts Channel.
https://www.cinemaverde.org/events/cinema-verde-2025-environmental-film-festival
SELECTED SCREENINGS
- The World Water Film Festival, Chicago, Illinois, 5/4/2026.
- Seattle Film Festival, Seattle, Washington, 9/24/2025.
- Mysuru International Water Film Festival, Bangalore, India, 6/22/2025.
- Cinema Verde Environmental Film and Arts Festival, Jacksonville, Florida, 4/20/2025.
- WRPN Women's International Film Festival, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, 12/1/2024.
- "Best of Festival," WRPN Women's International Film Festival.
- "Best Feature Film," Mysuru International Water Film Festival.
JETTY CATS
2017
On a rocky seaside jetty in San Diego, California, a colony of feral cats has survived for decades between ocean, tourism, and human care. Jetty Cats is a feature-length documentary that uses this colony as a lens onto contemporary animal rights debates to ask: what do humans owe to animals who live outside the boundaries of home, shelter, and wilderness?
The film focuses on the conflict over trap-neuter-return, or TNR, a practice in which feral cats are trapped, sterilized, vaccinated, and returned to their outdoor colonies. Supporters understand TNR and no-kill sheltering as humane alternatives to mass euthanasia; opponents argue that euthanasia may be more humane for the cats and more protective of surrounding ecosystems. Rather than treating this debate as abstract policy, Jetty Cats follows caregivers, advocates, critics, and animal welfare leaders whose convictions turn feral cat colonies into charged public questions.
Featuring an exclusive interview with Richard Avanzino, widely known as the “Godfather” of the no-kill movement, the film situates the jetty colony within a national shift in animal shelter ethics and policy. At its center is a question that extends beyond cats: when animals survive in spaces shaped by human abandonment and care, who has the authority to decide their fate?
TRAILER: https://vimeo.com/216685663
JETTY CATS IS AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING ON:
The Cinema Verde Environmental Film and Arts Channel
https://www.cinemaverde.org/film-archives/jetty-cats
Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/532984325
(As the primary feature of The New York Cat Film Festival Vol.1)
Amazon Prime
https://www.amazon.com/Cat-Film-Festival-Vol-1/
dp/B0G2J3P55J
Tubi
https://tubitv.com/movies/545573/cat-film-festival-vol-1
SELECTED SCREENINGS
New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/movies/the-ny-cat-film-festival-is-here-and-no-ones-allergic-to-movies.html
The film focuses on the conflict over trap-neuter-return, or TNR, a practice in which feral cats are trapped, sterilized, vaccinated, and returned to their outdoor colonies. Supporters understand TNR and no-kill sheltering as humane alternatives to mass euthanasia; opponents argue that euthanasia may be more humane for the cats and more protective of surrounding ecosystems. Rather than treating this debate as abstract policy, Jetty Cats follows caregivers, advocates, critics, and animal welfare leaders whose convictions turn feral cat colonies into charged public questions.
Featuring an exclusive interview with Richard Avanzino, widely known as the “Godfather” of the no-kill movement, the film situates the jetty colony within a national shift in animal shelter ethics and policy. At its center is a question that extends beyond cats: when animals survive in spaces shaped by human abandonment and care, who has the authority to decide their fate?
TRAILER: https://vimeo.com/216685663
JETTY CATS IS AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING ON:
The Cinema Verde Environmental Film and Arts Channel
https://www.cinemaverde.org/film-archives/jetty-cats
Vimeo
https://vimeo.com/532984325
(As the primary feature of The New York Cat Film Festival Vol.1)
Amazon Prime
https://www.amazon.com/Cat-Film-Festival-Vol-1/
dp/B0G2J3P55J
Tubi
https://tubitv.com/movies/545573/cat-film-festival-vol-1
SELECTED SCREENINGS
- New York Cat Film Festival, NYC, New York, 12/9/2017.
- Glendale International Film Festival, Glendale, California, 9/20/2017.
- Cinema Verde Environmental Film and Arts Festival, Jacksonville, Florida, 2/9/2017.
- Kolkata Wildlife and Environmental Film Festival, Kolkata, India, 9/2/2016.
- "Compassion Award," Cinema Verde Environmental Film and Arts Festival.
New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/movies/the-ny-cat-film-festival-is-here-and-no-ones-allergic-to-movies.html
BOMBAY BEACH SOIREE
2025
2025
Set to Nathaniel Mayer’s R&B classic “Village of Love,” this music video reimagines the song’s theme of communal belonging through the residents of Bombay Beach, a desert town on the shore of the polluted Salton Sea. Against a landscape of shoreline ruins, Dadaesque art, and ecological decline, the film shows how artistic expression and environmental concern become forms of survival that allow a fragile community to hold itself together in a decaying but cherished place.
BOMBAY BEACH SOIREE IS AVAILABLE TO VIEW ON:
https://vimeo.com/1134669409
SELECTED SCREENINGS
AWARDS
BOMBAY BEACH SOIREE IS AVAILABLE TO VIEW ON:
https://vimeo.com/1134669409
SELECTED SCREENINGS
- San Jose Independent Film Festival, San Jose, California, 1/27/2026.
- San Diego Music Awards, Sponsored by the Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, California, 1/15/2026.
- AI International Music Video Festival, Hollywood, California, 1/25/26.
AWARDS
- "Award of Excellence for Best Music Video," San Diego Movie Awards, the Museum of Photographic Arts.
- "Honorable Mention for Best Editing," AI International Music Video Festival.
BUNGALOW EXPOSE
2012
This short video examines a possibly haunted vintage bungalow in Carlsbad, California, as an intimate archive of architecture, memory, and social history. Opening with the development of the California bungalow and its ideals of domestic life, the work situates the featured house within the broader history of Carlsbad’s transformation from seaside village to a coastal resort community. By tracing the experiences of individuals who owned and inhabited the bungalow over the past 90 years, the video explores how shifts in class, land value, regional identity, and economic development become embedded in the life of a single home.
BUNGALOW EXPOSE IS AVAILABLE TO VIEW ON:
https://vimeo.com/104620285
SELECTED SCREENINGS
BUNGALOW EXPOSE IS AVAILABLE TO VIEW ON:
https://vimeo.com/104620285
SELECTED SCREENINGS
- Delhi Short and Documentary Film Festival, New Delhi, India, 4/17/2022.
- Artplay Moscow Film Festival, Moscow, Russia, 5/19/2016.
- Cinemonde Private Film Series, NYC, New York, 5/11/2015.
- "Honorable Mention," LA Underground Film Forum, Los Angeles, California, 2024.
- "Best Art Deco History," Cloud City Bad Film Festival, Brooklyn, New York, 2018.
THE NEXT PANDEMIC
2022
A micro-documentary that juxtaposes images of industrial animal farming with a 1970s Bee Gees love song to expose the emotional dissonance between popular culture’s fantasies of tenderness and the realities of animal confinement. Through this collision of sound and image, the work illuminates the inhumane, disease-producing conditions of factory farming and asks how sentiment, denial, and industrial violence coexist in contemporary food systems.
THE NEXT PANDEMIC IS AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING ON:
https://vimeo.com/764219714
SELECTED SCREENINGS
THE NEXT PANDEMIC IS AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING ON:
https://vimeo.com/764219714
SELECTED SCREENINGS
- Istanbul International Shorts Film Festival, Istanbul, Turkey, 4/27/24.
- Austin Micro Film Festival, Austin, Texas, 3/11/23.
- Berlin Flash Film Festival, Berlin, Germany, 7/31/2022.
- "Best Super Short Film," Portland New Alternative Voices Film Festival, Portland, Oregon, 2/24/2023.
Contact
- Carlsbad, California, United States