Global figures indicate rape occurs on all continents. And while incidents of acid throwing as a gender crime (used more in robberies in Britain, for instance) are reported to be high in South and Southeast Asia, many other countries, including Italy face the problem where some women are similarly targeted by men whose advances they have turned down.

"I do consider myself a feminist," Devineni, 44, tells China Daily, adding that often men don't talk about gender violence and women look at it as not being a man's issue.

The third installment of the series, titled Priya and the Last Girls, is about sex trafficking and will likely be out in the next two years, he says.

The Russian Woodpecker, a documentary on the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine that he coproduced, won the Grand Jury Award at the US Sundance Film Festival in 2015.

At "very generic" workshops organized by the Chinese nonprofit organization Crossroads Centre last week in Beijing, Devineni says he discussed storytelling through drawings about issues that the participants from some local NGOs said affected their communities, such as pollution in cities or child abuse in the countryside.