Entertainment One has acquired ThinkFilm’s Canadian assets, and will release the indie distributor’s foreign titles in Canada through 2010, to boot.

Under an agreement to be unveiled Thursday, ThinkFilm will at long last fall into line with Canada’s foreign ownership restrictions, as it sells the Canadian rights to 235 movie titles to Entertainment One.

That sale was prompted by the purchase of ThinkFilm in 2006 by Los Angeles-based film financier and producer David Bergstein.

The Canadian assets at ThinkFilm — which today is run mostly out of New York by theatrical distribution head Mark Urman — have been on the auction block for more than a year. TVA Films and Maple Pictures were among those that assessed its library for possible purchase.

The library includes a host of Sony Pictures Classics titles, including Ed Harris’ Pollock and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Other U.S. titles that Entertainment One will acquire include Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother, the Ryan Gosling-starrer Half Nelson, Shortbus, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, and Woody Allen’s Sweet and Lowdown. The library also contains a host of documentaries, such as Chris Smith’s American Movie.

Patrice Théroux, Entertainment One’s president of filmed entertainment, says around 75 of the ThinkFilm titles will be released as DVDs. The TV broadcast rights will be exploited for another 75.

The ThinkFilm library does not include Serendipity Point Films titles such as Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies and Istvan Szabo’s Being Julia — as then-producer Robert Lantos took his films back when he cashed out a near-50% stake in ThinkFilm upon its sale to Bergstein.

Lantos subsequently formed his own Canadian distribution house, Maximum Films, which recently agreed to pool its backroom operations with Seville Entertainment in Toronto. Entertainment One bought Seville last summer, and last week lured Yari Film Group away from Alliance Films. Seville will handle eight to 10 Yari titles and an additional 10 titles to come annually from Summit Entertainment.

Théroux plans to save on costs by pushing ThinkFilm, Summit and Yari titles through Seville.

‘The synergy for us is being able to continue to exploit the ThinkFilm library and release the new titles on theatrical and DVD using Seville, which allows us to generate revenues at a reduced cost compared to what ThinkFilm incurred to do it themselves,’ he says.

On the theatrical front, Entertainment One will release between eight and 12 ThinkFilm titles annually, and receive another dozen straight-to-DVD titles. Seville will fill out its annual release slate with around six to eight Canadian movie titles, and another 12 to 14 indies acquired at festivals and markets.

‘ThinkFilm has a history of bringing high-quality independent films to the marketplace. Their product line is very complementary with Seville’s existing lineup,’ says Seville president David Reckziegel.

For ThinkFilm, the deal with Entertainment One does not greatly change its distribution strategy.

‘ThinkFilm was always a U.S.-oriented company to be based in Toronto. Now, instead of paying salaries to release our titles, we’re paying a fee to someone else,’ says ThinkFilm founder and CEO Jeff Sackman.

Besides having to sort out details with Canadian Heritage and Telefilm Canada to spin off its Canadian assets, Sackman says the Canadian output deal took longer than anticipated because Entertainment One has only recently arrived on the scene as a movie distributor.

The pact was hammered out by Sackman and Marc Hirshberg for ThinkFilm, and Théroux and Reckziegel for Entertainment One.