Jiří Weiss's work in the Czech film industry following the end of the Second World War was full of paradoxes. Although he was considered a documentarian, having been part of the team that established a documentary group at the A-B Company's film studios before the war, and having gained experience unmatched by any of his colleagues as a wartime director of informational and documentary films for the British government's The Crown Film Unit, Weiss did not make many documentary films after the war. In fact, his involvement in the restructuring and development of documentary filmmaking as part of Czechoslovakia's nationalized film industry was quite limited. However, Weiss's work in fiction film carried a number of documentary elements while still embracing stylized techniques and exploring a variety of genres.

Thanks to his wartime activities, Weiss was relatively well connected abroad. His ease with English and other languages made it possible for him to rub elbows at various international film festivals, and he was certainly not short of international ambitions. During the 1950s he developed a number of international projects, without much success, and it was only in the mid- and late 1960s that he found international partners to coproduce the feature film Třicet jedna ve stinu (Ninety Degrees in the Shade, 1965) and the made-for-television film Spravedlnost pro Selvina (Justice for Selwyn, 1968).