While this January 1st 2010 will mark at the same time a change of year and the beginning of a new decade, it is also the first anniversary of this site. One year ago FilmHaiti.com was launched without much fanfare, with only a few posted videos but a lot of ambition and many dreams. Originally designed as a simple platform archiving the products released by media firms Video Plus Productions and Imagine Haiti over the years, the project has gone beyond this simple approach, while also retaining the original goals. The site now offers a diverse and multimedia image of Haiti across various categories ranging from feature films to mere advertisements of fifteen seconds with also documentaries or short films and music videos.

The number of visitors has grown steadily. They were more than 12,000 to surf the site in December watching our films some 28,000 times. Our visitors belong in their vast majority to the Haitian diaspora in the United States and Canada. Because of our success, the needs have also increased. Our servers must now deliver hundreds of gigabytes each month to customers from around the world.

In 2010 we intend to develop some of our still embryonic categories such as the feature film category. Some films (mostly documentaries and short films) will now be produced specifically for the site and available only here.

FilmHaiti.com offers its visitors original, varied and free films that demand the availability of many human and material resources. We will make great efforts to maintain free access to all our movies. But we must emphasize that our donation campaign has not yielded encouraging results last year. We will therefore continue to sell advertisements on the site in 2010 and you may even expect a possible increase. We’d rather have your contributions help us avoid this option.

Nevertheless we remain committed to serve you throughout the year with films that we hope will both entertain and educate.

We post videos and films that we hope will please you. You can share the pleasure with your friends or family either by sending them a link or by directly putting or embedding your favorites on your Facebook, hi5, Myspace or blog page.

To do that, just go to the  page of the video you want to share and click the Share This Video link. You will get multiple options that you may click on and they will bring you to your social network or blog page where you will complete the sharing process.

Or you can click the Embed This Video link. You will get a code. Make sure you select it all by right clicking and copy it. You can paste this code on any adequate webpage (such as hi5) and your video will display on the page.

More simply if you like a video or the entire website, just copy the related link and email it to your friends. Do not forget to comment and rate the videos you like and even complain about those you don’t like.

Our initial goal when starting this whole project was to put online some of our rich and valuable archives. In many aspects, it has been a huge success. With more and more visitors every day, with more and more videos added and more to come, we ambition to become the Haitian top on demand video website.

There is however room for improvement. We noticed that you have not been commenting much on the posted videos. This website is primarily yours and your opinion does matter. To ease things, you do not need to register anymore to post a comment. So please, let us know about what you think of our videos.

Although not necessary anymore to comment, registration is still useful though. It gives you access to our weekly summary and movies will be accessible only to registered users when they are posted. And registration is free!

It’s been a few months since we started feeding this website with films and videos from many categories, all about Haiti. The feedback has been positive and many of you have shown their commitment and support. More videos will be coming every week and we will probably start posting feature-length movies in the very near future.

For us this has meant (and still means) a lot of work, selecting the videos, transferring them from sometimes obsolete media and uploading them to the site. Traffic has been steadily increasing, that means more bandwidth must be available to accommodate an increasing catalog of more and more films. Needless to say that all this comes with a cost.

Of course the website is not ad-free, which is maybe unfortunate but at this time it barely covers our hosting cost. Thus the need for this (maybe annoying) pop-up window that shows up on our paused videos and puts your donation a few clicks away. It is up to you viewer, if you appreciate the effort and the work, to contribute and help sustain and improve it. No matter how much (could be only the price of a burger meal), it will be appreciated and will certainly help build a better site. We thank you all in advance.

We are proud to announce that the store is now open and offers a wide selection of films about Haiti on DVD as well as films on the African-American culture. We also have a great choice of movies in french and also Haitian music.

To help you enhance your web surfing experience we have many computers and notebooks and computer-related items.

Finally for the aspiring movie-maker or audio and video enthusiast we bring you the most featured cameras or electronics available on the market.

We hope you enjoy your shopping with us. Visit the store here.

Welcome to FilmHaiti.com. The purpose of this site is to bring you films and videos about Haiti in many genres and categories. The site features three languages and let you register to interact. The project is still in its beta phase so we expect your feedback and comments.