With 2012’s Camera Shy, writer-director Mark Sawers gave us an unsung gem about a corrupt Vancouver city councillor who loses his mind. Sawers’s newest offering lampoons an even bigger and no less pathetic target.

Dudes are on the verge of extinction in No Men Beyond This Point, leaving a society of parthenogenetically reproducing, nature-worshipping women to thrive in their absence.

The world’s remaining blokes are left to languish with their beer and video games in an array of rural sanctuaries—plus the whole of Australia.

“That gets the biggest laugh,” Sawers told the Straight. “We were showing it in Rotterdam, and the entire European audience laughed their heads off. It’s just a universal joke, for some reason, about Australia. I don’t know if it’s because everyone knows that Australian men are kind of dicks, or is it because it was a penal colony? Why does everybody immediately burst out laughing?”

Australian or otherwise, Sawers added that men are basically redundant in his view. “I’ve certainly been aware for a long time that men have no purpose,” he said. “I have two kids and the feeling, for me, that at any particular point I could step away for a long time and it really wouldn’t have that much of an impact on the situation? My wife couldn’t do that. On some level, I think men feel it.”

Screening at the Rio on Saturday (September 26) and SFU next Friday (October 2), No Men Beyond This Point is further recommended for depicting the saddest little animated sperm you’ve ever seen.

Check out this year's film schedule and visit our guide for complete VIFF coverage.