[1] As a professor at FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts)[2] in Prague, Kadár trained most of the directors who spawned the Czechoslovak New Wave in the 1960s.
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.
[7] 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 expressing 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.
[3] While touting the obligatory Marxist-Leninist doctrine and adhering to Socialist-Realist filmmaking, Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos first bounced between comedy and hard-core propaganda.
[9] Their choice of themes began to change with the first, mild relaxation of communism in Czechoslovakia after Soviet leader Khrushchev's secret speech in 1956.
Kadár and Klos's first film during this minor thaw, Three Wishes (Tři přání, 1958), a cagey satire on aspects of everyday life, outraged the authorities and was shelved until the more relaxed conditions in 1963.
[11] Their Communist Party membership protected them from a worse fate, however, and Kadár was able to find a refuge in semi-propagandist, technically avant-garde work for the early Czechoslovak multi-screen shows at the Laterna magika (Magic Lantern) project.