Holiday Pic ‘A Chocolate Christmas’ to be lensed in Gramado and NYC

GRAMADO, Brazil — Vet Brazilian helmer-producer Paulo Nascimento will lense “A Chocolate Christmas,” a Portuguese-language holiday-themed feature film in the mountain resort of Gramado, in southern Brazil, and New York City, he told Variety. 

The film will shoot over December and January. Nascimento is set announce the film project t his panel on Sunday at the Gramado Film Festival.

“A Chocolate Christmas” weighs in as a romantic drama set mainly during Natal Luz de Gramado, recognized by Guinness as the world’s longest Christmas festival. 

The pic is produced by Nascimento’s Accorde Filmes and H2O Films, with co-production from NYC-based indie production company Rose Pictures. H2O, one of the leading independent distributors in Brazil, is to open the pic in local theaters over the 2027 Christmas season.

Nascimento said he will shoot the feature during one week in NYC in December 2026 and over four weeks in Gramado in January 2027, including exteriors set in Natal Luz de Gramado. The festivity includes Christmas parades with floats, performers and characters, an open-air show staged over water with music, fireworks and special effects, concerts with the Gramado Symphony Orchestra and an immersive performance combining technology, visual effects and illuminated costumes.

“From a producer’s perspective, Natal Luz has a production value that not even a major Netflix production could provide. We will have access to all of the event’s activities and incorporate them into the film. In other words, we will have the scale of a major production without the corresponding costs,” Nascimento told Variety.

The story follows Linda, a 17-year-old teenager who, after having her heart broken by her boyfriend, leaves her family in Gramado to study in the U.S. 10 years later, now recognized in the U.S. as a talented chocolatier and preparing to open her first chocolate shop in Manhattan, she is forced to return to Brazil after her father suffers a heart attack. Back in her hometown and involved once again with her family’s chocolate business, Linda reunites with her former boyfriend and, amid the traditions of Christmas in Gramado, rediscovers the possibility of opening her heart to love.

Nascimento said he has directed 17 films in his career, including political drama “In Your Name,” winner of four Kikito prizes at the Gramado Fest 2009, and “Westend of the World,” a co-production with Argentina starring Cesar Troncoso as a veteran of the Falklands War.

His most recent features are “13 Souls,” a supernatural possession horror movie distributed online in the U.K. in May via Seven Tales and Trinity Content Partners, and the still unreleased “The Taxidermist.”

“I have always made political dramas, and now I’m making genre films: a horror film, a melodrama and a Christmas movie. Cinema has shifted toward niche films,” Nascimento observed.