Ján Kadár (1 April 1918 – 1 June 1979) was a Hungarian-born Slovak film writer and director of Jewish heritage. As a filmmaker, he worked in Czechoslovakia, the United States, and Canada. Most of his films were directed in tandem with Elmar Klos. The two became best known for their Oscar-winning The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze, 1965). As a professor at FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts) in Prague, Kadár trained most of the directors who spawned the Czechoslovak New Wave in the 1960s. After moving to the United States, he became professor of film direction at the American Film Institute in Beverly Hills. His personal life as well as his films encompassed and spanned a range of cultures: Jewish, Slovak, Hungarian, Czech, and American. Early years Kadár was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary. Later his family moved to Rožňava, in the newly created Czechoslovakia, where he grew up. Kadár took up the law in Bratislava after high school, but soon transferred to the first Department of Film in Czechoslovakia (probably the third such department in Europe) at the School of Industrial Arts in Bratislava in 1938, where he took classes with Slovak film's notable director Karel Plicka until the department was closed in 1939. Kadár's home town became part of Hungary again in 1938. With the application of anti-Jewish laws, Kádár was detained in a labor camp. He later said that it was for the first time in his life that he acted as a Jew: He refused conversion and served in a work unit with a yellow armband rather than a white one which was the privilege of those baptized. His parents and sister were murdered in the death camp at Auschwitz. Film director Overview Kadár began his directing career in Bratislava, Slovakia after World War II with the documentary Life Is Rising from the Ruins (Na troskách vyrastá život, 1945). After several documentaries expressive of the views of the Communist Party, which he joined, Kadár moved to Prague in 1947 and returned to Bratislava temporarily in order to make Kathy (Katka, 1950), his first feature film. Beginning in 1952, he co-directed all his Czechoslovak films with Elmar Klos solely in Prague except their Czech−Slovak projects Death Is Called Engelchen (, , 1963), The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze, 1965), and Adrift (, , , 1969) shot with Slovak,