That’s how I found Nita and Zita. Two Jewish Hungarian sisters. Born into a world that was both hard for women and especially for Jews.

In the 1920s, as fascism began its slow, poisonous rise across Europe, they made a radical choice: they left. They crossed an ocean, landed in New Orleans, and did something extraordinary — they reinvented themselves as internationally renowned burlesque dancers.

They didn’t just survive. They dazzled and thrived. They rewrote the story of who a Jewish woman could be. The documentary, Nita & Zita Project, is more than a nostalgic exercise. It is more than just a footnote in history. Making this film with my partner Marci Darling was an act of resistance. Because right now, in 2026, Jewish women are watching the world again with that familiar, ancient wariness.

We are parsing headlines, recalibrating safety, explaining to our children why certain things must be said carefully, or not at all. Assimilation whispers its seductive logic: disappear a little, be less visible, make yourself easier to swallow. Nita and Zita answered that whisper by stepping into the spotlight. They created their own art with their own creative flair. Their eccentricity wasn’t recklessness — it was armor. It was joy as defiance. Art saved them. Sisterhood sustained them.

There is something shattering and sacred about two women holding each other up through exile, through reinvention, through a world that wanted them gone. Their bond wasn’t just love — it was a creative and survival pact. Together, they built an identity that no pogrom or polite American antisemitism could fully touch. They made themselves impossible to erase.

In an age of fragmentation — where Jewish identity is contested, politicized, flattened — Nita and Zita offer us something we desperately need: a model of creative devotion that refuses to apologize. They show us that to make art is to insist on your humanity. That to be eccentric, excessive, gloriously yourself, is a form of resistance.

I came to this film because October 7 called me home to my own Jewish identity. But Nita and Zita are teaching me something deeper — that the women who came before us were never waiting to be rescued. They were dancing. Fiercely, beautifully, on their own terms.

By Marci Darling
I often describe The Nita & Zita Project as “Grey Gardens meets Gypsy Rose Lee meets Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants… with a dash of Fiddler on the Roof.” The sisters wore sequins like armor and turned scandal into art. They defied the rules in the 1920’s with hand-stitched fantasies, provocative performances, and a fearless refusal to conform.
The Nita & Zita Project is the extraordinary story of Flora and Piroska Gellert, Jewish sisters who rose to international burlesque stardom, then became recluses and transformed into the ultimate New Orleans eccentrics. They danced around the world, glittering globetrotters traveling hand-in-hand from port-to-port. They became recluses in New Orleans, buying a little cottage in New Orleans and painting it with dots. After they died, their neighbor found thousands of costumes and ephemera made from found objects.

She then held a yard sale that lasted five years.

The journey of Nita and Zita is marked by both the dazzle of the spotlight and the shadows of solitude. It is a testament to their unbreakable bond and their vibrant heritage.

I discovered the sisters in 1996 while standing in a dive bar in the French Quarter. I glanced across the room and saw a photograph on the whiskey-stained wall.

It was Zita.

She didn’t hang there. She struck–a lightning bolt across the crowded bar. The next day, as if pulled by a thread I couldn’t see, I stepped into a junk shop and there she was again, this time with her sister, their costumes hanging from the ceiling like tattered sleeping birds. Feathers shedding. Sequins dulled, but still winking, catching the light. Along one wall stood an entire shrine built to Nita and Zita, adopted by women all over the Quarter as their “chosen ancestors.”

Dancers. Acrobats. Contortionists… Nita and Zita bent their bodies and, perhaps, the world around them.

Inspired, I returned to my dance partner/soul sister in Los Angeles and together we created a vintage acro-contortionist burlesque act based on the sisters. As the years passed, I heard snippets of their myths and legends and one winter night twenty five years later, I awoke from a dream knowing what I must do: tell their story. The spark of their history had taken root somewhere deep, and now it was burning upward, insisting on air. It did not ask permission. It did not whisper. It demanded.

It was now 2023, and very little was known about these Jewish Hungarian sisters. What existed was a constellation of rumors—bright, contradictory, impossible to hold all at once:

“They were international dancers, shimmying across continents before disappearing into New Orleans. They were wealthy. They were destitute. They weren’t sisters at all. They were lovers, best friends, co-conspirators against the ordinary. They painted their house with polka dots. They patched their roof with tin can lids.”

No facts. Only echoes. And so I set out on an adventure to the places that deal in the quiet architecture of truth—the historical archives.

At the New England Genealogical Society, I began pulling threads. And the threads began to pull back. Travel manifests. Names repeated side by side. Ports stamped like a rhythm:

New York.
New Orleans.
Panama.
Buenos Aires.
Havana.
San Francisco.
Shanghai.
Manila.

I found their immigration papers from Hungary to New York City in 1922. I marveled at the multiple trips the sisters took, criss-crossing the world alone on luxury liners in the high-glamour days of international travel.
The doors of research flung open further when I was referred to the burlesque-dancing Curator of Rare Books at the Historic New Orleans Collection named Nina Bozak.
Nina informed me that HNOC had several items belonging to Nita and Zita but none of it had been digitized yet.

And so I headed to New Orleans and opened the boxes.
The ones that almost didn’t survive.

Nina told me their belongings had been thrown away—discarded like the final scene of a story no one thought worth reading. But someone, a stranger with better instincts than history itself, rescued them.

Inside those boxes, the sisters had been waiting.

Programs. Flyers. Contracts. Clippings. Receipts. Invitations.

Evidence.

They had performed. They had traveled. They had lived.

Not as rumor—but as record.

On Royal street in New Orleans, I opened the past with my own hands.

Paper by paper, the myth began to fracture—and something far more extraordinary emerged in its place.

Truth.

Younger sister Zita (Piroska) danced through World War I as a young girl.

She toured Transylvania while violence gathered like weather around her. She moved to New York City with her older sister, living with her brothers in Hell’s Kitchen. The sisters were soon performing around the city–Harlem in 1924, Coney Island in 1927.

They performed in Shanghai in 1937, as invasion turned the city into a threshold of war.

They returned to Europe in 1939—Berlin, Budapest—moving through a continent on the brink.

History roared.

They danced anyway.

Eventually, the stage shifted. Tucson. Then back to New Orleans.

They aged—but did not stop. And when the world no longer made space for their performances, they made space for themselves.

They built a universe from scraps.

Tin cans became crowns.
Cereal boxes unraveled into fringe.
Shoelaces were dyed, rewoven, reborn.
Cigarette foil curled into pom-poms they sewed onto a red hat or sculpted into jewelry that caught whatever light it could find.

Dresses made from hundreds of fragments, shoes cut apart and reassembled, hats that looked like small celebrations.

They had made stages around the world their home, now their home became a stage.

They created a makeshift stage in their living room and photographed each other—dressed in their inventions, surrounded by their former selves, layered in time.

They were described as “ecstatic artists,” their elegant dresses as “ragamuffin chanel.”

It seemed joy itself had refused to abandon them.

And they had refused to abandon joy.

We found them again at the end.

Side by side in the pauper’s section of Hebrew Rest Cemetery.

No spectacle. No applause. Just earth.

We brought stones.

Then others came.

And something began to happen.

Glittered stones. Tiny shoes. Music in the graveyard. A 1920s band threading melody through the air. Voices rising in Kaddish.

A kind of resurrection—not of bodies, but of presence.

They were no longer alone.

The film traveled, as they had.

New Orleans. Salem. Hollywood. Santa Fe. Truth or Consequences. Nice. Romania. Beyond.

Sold-out rooms. Feathered audiences. Sequins flickering in the dark.

People wrote to us afterward—not to comment, but to confess:

They went home and made something.

As if the sisters had reached through time again.

As if the current was still live.

And then—we went back to the beginning.

Baia Mare, Romania, formerly known as Nagybanya Hungary… before the war.

Their first landscape.

We stood outside the ruins of Flora’s school, its roof caved in, its silence loud with what used to be.

We imagined her at the window. Looking outward. Not yet knowing the shape of her life—but already feeling its pull.

We walked the cobblestones of Lendvay Street, their one known address there.

We could almost see them—one with a bag of sewing tools, the other turning the street into a rehearsal space, cartwheeling through possibilities.

The town had once been an artist colony—painters arriving from everywhere, filling the air with color, canvas, creativity. The sisters grew up inside that vibrant world.

And then—the synagogue. Locked.

In 1944, the area became a ghetto.

History closed in.

Few came back.

Anaïs Nin wrote, “We do not escape into philosophy, psychology, and art. We go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.”

Again and again, the Gellert sisters remade themselves and built their own worlds.

And somehow, in telling their story, I was able to do the same.