SEARCHING FOR NIRVANA

From the director of the Netflix documentary feature The Last Shaman,

A four-part docuseries by Raz Degan

A fugitive turned monk chases redemption across continents, until it rests in the hands of the daughter he left behind.

OVERVIEW

1970s Italy. The country’s first heroin-overdose death detonates a national uproar, and Giancarlo is the one holding the syringe. Cast as the face of a counterculture gone wrong, he vanishes. Fleeing justice across Asia, he boards the legendary Magic Bus, the overland escape route of the lost, the hunted, and the hopeful. In India, amid holy men and funeral pyres, guilt drives him to the unthinkable: he throws his passport into the Ganges, erases his identity, and is reborn Shiva Das, a wandering monk in pursuit of Nirvana. His spiritual ascent grants him access to sacred sects and forbidden holy places, worlds unimaginable to Western minds. Extreme rituals fuel his pursuit of redemption, until renunciation becomes obsession. For a moment, it works.

Then it doesn’t.

He touches Nirvana: too much, too fast. It sends him spiraling into smuggling and addiction in Bangkok’s underworld, where love briefly surfaces. And still he cannot outrun himself. Arrested and exiled, she is left without answers. Through monasteries and brothels, gurus and addicts, each rise promises liberation; each fall tightens his karmic debt.

Forty years later, in Italy, his body failing and the world closing in, Shiva Das faces the reckoning long waiting at his door: a daughter he abandoned decades earlier. He sets off in a desperate search to find her, unaware she has spent her life tracing the wreckage he left behind.

As their paths draw closer, the key to his final passage to Varanasi rests in her hands, and neither knows what awaits.

EPISODE SYNOPSIS & TRAILERS

EP 1 – KARMA | Escape

Italy, late 1960s: protests, heroin, and a generation burning the rulebook. When Giancarlo gives his girlfriend a fatal overdose, his entire world collapses: the media hunts him, the police close in, and even his own mother shuts the door. With no future left in Italy, he jumps on the Magic Bus heading east, clinging to the hope that distance equals salvation. But the road only pushes him deeper into the guilt he’s trying to outrun. When he finally reaches India he’s a fugitive stepping into something far harsher than the disaster he left behind.

EP 2 – DHARMA | Transformation

Varanasi hits him like a fist: death, smoke, rituals, and a guru who reads him like an open wound. Giancarlo enters the ashram thinking he can reinvent himself, but extremism tears him apart before it rebuilds anything. Ritual by ritual, he sheds his old life until the only move left is to burn it entirely. He throws his passport in the Ganges, takes the name Shiva Das, a clean break with the man he was. What he doesn’t yet understand is that the path he chose demands more than devotion; it demands everything.

EP 3 – PRALAYA | Spiral

Shiva’s life as a sadhu turns from devotion to obsession as the rituals grow darker and the line between sanity and surrender wears thin. When the spiritual fire becomes too much, he snaps and disappears into 1980s Bangkok: a city built for self-destruction he knows far well. There he dives into drugs, smuggling, and chaos, briefly anchored by a woman who becomes pregnant with his child. Afraid of repeating the past, he repeats it anyway, abandoning her and spiraling until he’s arrested and deported. Stripped of everything, he limps back to India, trying to rebuild a life out of the ruins of all the lives he’s broken.

EP 4 – NIRVANA | Reckoning

Decades later, Shiva Das is trapped in Italy, fading fast. His final wish is to take his last breath in Varanasi. Bureaucracy blocks him at every turn. As his body fails, a truth resurfaces: he left behind a daughter before she was born. The realization is brutal, no ritual, no renunciation will redeem him. Only forgiveness might. He begins searching for the daughter he never met, unaware she has spent a lifetime tracing his steps. In a final turn of fate, she is the gatekeeper to the Nirvana he has sought all his life. Whether their paths converge or miss entirely will decide everything, whether their karmic bond is released at last, or carried into the next life.

12 YEARS IN THE MAKING

Filmed over twelve years across three continents, Searching for Nirvana is crafted from a rare archive of never-before-seen real-life footage captured throughout Shiva’s journey, alongside photographs, diaries, interviews, and archival materials.

Reenactments shot on location bridge the unseen years, allowing the series to move seamlessly between lived experience and remembered truth.

MAIN CHARACTERS

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SHIVA DAS

Born Giancarlo Cassuti, a freethinker and musician, a rebellious anarchist, drug addict, and alcoholic. He crossed the realms of society a trafficker, a deserter, and prisoner, transforming into a monk, an ascetic renouncer, and a devotee of the Dharma. A passionate lover and relentless thrill-seeker, Shiva is torn between his longing for liberation and the weight of karma that refuses to let go.

DIRECTOR'S NOTES

Searching for Nirvana is a story about karma in its human form — the past we inherit, the damage we create, and how those choices ripple through generations. For twelve years I followed Giancarlo across continents as he tried to outrun guilt, identity, and the weight he never meant to pass on.

What I found wasn’t a holy man or a criminal, but someone caught in a cycle older than himself — the same pattern that shaped the daughter he never met, and the life she grew up inside. Like The Last Shaman, where the jungle framed a father–son reckoning, this film uses the Ganges, the Himalayas, and Bangkok to reveal a quieter truth: the scars between parent and child don’t disappear just because we cross a border or change a name.

In the end, the film leaves one question open: Can we step out of the karma we’re born into, or do we finally have to face it — together?

— Raz Degan