E-Mail This Article to a Friend GAIETY THEATRE Showing next Thursday: The Gaiety’s demise BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

Readers of the Boston Phoenix have followed the sad saga of the destruction of the Gaiety Theatre, which stood for nearly a century. It is currently being torn down to make way for Kensington Place, a 30-story luxury-condominium building in Chinatown. Now, they can see the film.

Next Thursday, as part of an Asians in Action fundraiser, Overshadowed: Boston’s Chinatown gets its public premiere. The three-part documentary was made by a 10-person Emerson College journalism class. The first section of the half-hour film discusses high-rise developments in Chinatown, like the Kensington; the middle tells of the Gaiety’s demise; and the final segment profiles Da Zsong Lei, an aging Chinatown resident facing a 25 percent rent increase that could price him out of his apartment.

Class instructor Paul Niwa sent his students out into Emerson’s surrounding neighborhood to find subject material. "Students see Chinatown as a place to get cheap food and drugs," Niwa says. "This was a piece where we as a class grew as individuals as well as journalists."

It didn’t take long for the Gaiety Theatre to attract the interest of Angela Kim, Sarah Stahler, and Andres Brender, who made the nine-minute Gaiety segment over the course of the semester. They were able to document the theater’s historic role in African-American art, and the public attempt to save the building.

What they didn’t count on was the building’s actual demolition, which began just two weeks before the film screened on Monday. "We had to put in a lot of hours reorganizing the segment," says Kim.

Their headache is the audience’s gain, however. The filmmakers were able to shoot footage of the half-wrecked theater, whose missing wall provides a view of the internal performance space that activists thought was worth preserving. "People were just stopping in the street, looking and taking pictures, asking ‘what is that building?’" says Kim.

Overshadowed: Boston’s Chinatown will be shown at an Asians in Action fundraiser, which will include Asian art, food, music, and a charity poker tournament, on May 12, at Tonic, 1316 Comm Ave, in Allston. A $20 suggested donation will go toward a community center in Chinatown. E-mail Anh Nguyen at anguyen_thi@yahoo.com for more information.