In a move that will add a significant European producer to its growing roster of strategic partnerships, AAC Fact has swooped in to save London, Eng.-based doc producer Cafe Productions from folding.

While a takeover has not been announced yet, Ted Riley, president of Alliance Atlantis Television Distribution, says his company is supporting Cafe’s cash flow and doing due diligence for the next few weeks while working out the future relationship between the two companies.

‘Ideally, we’re going to own the company,’ he says.

For AAC Fact, coming together with Cafe would be a strong strategic move as it would bring the new label a presence and credibility in the u.k.

AAC Fact and Cafe both have strong working relationships with Discovery (u.s.), which was another reason the Toronto company moved in so quickly, says Riley. ‘We wanted to be good citizens to Discovery.’

On Sept. 20, after a couple weeks of speculation, Cafe announced it was in financial trouble and Alliance Atlantis Communications stepped right up.

In addition to providing programming to Alliance Atlantis Broadcasting’s History Television and Life Network, Cafe has had a long relationship with Andy Thomson, exec vp of Alliance Atlantis Television Production, through Great North Communications.

Andre Singer is the ceo of Cafe, which for the last eight years has stood as a pillar of coproduction. However, in a recent interview with Playback sister publication RealScreen, he said, ‘We found that over eight years we’ve done lots of big coproductions for lots of big series and even if we own a large bit of the net profit of those productions, we don’t see a penny because the advances have to be repaid, the distributor has to have their 25%-30%. Even if [the coproduction] makes a lot of money, we have to wait at least four years before we start seeing a return.’

But Cafe’s most current financial strains became critical surprisingly quickly when ‘various projects got delayed, various sales that were promised didn’t come through,’ says Singer.

Thomson and Riley continued talks with Cafe at mipcom, but Riley says, ‘The formal outcome will not manifest until two weeks after mip.’

Meantime, AAC Fact, which has already made first-look distribution deals with Toronto’s Associated Producers and Barna-Alper Productions, plans to make at least two or three more strategic partnerships, with either ownership positions or first-look agreements.

The company is currently talking seriously with a couple more Canadian and European producers. *

-www.allianceatlantis.com