Jiří Weiss (29 March 1913 – 9 April 2004) was a Czech film director, screenwriter, writer, playwright and pedagogue.

[5] His father, who disagreed with his life choices and could still make decisions about his underage son, had him institutionalized in a mental hospital.

He befriended leading intellectuals of the Left Front in Prague, including Vladislav Vančura and Ivan Olbracht.

He borrowed a 16mm camera from Jiří Lehovec [cs] and inspired by Soviet filmmakers he made his first amateur film about young people canoeing on Sázava River.

The film was screened at Kotva cinema in Prague as part of the avant–garde program together with The Blood of a Poet or Un Chien Andalou.

In 1936, he was hired at A-B studio in Prague and as the first assignment he made his first professional film Sun Is Shining over Lužnice.

[2] Weiss volunteered for the British Army and was assigned to make war documentaries for Crown Film Unit.

On 13 March 1943, Weiss and Ota Ornest [cs] directed a MacNeice's play A Town without a Name at Royal Albert Hall as a part of the London Calling Prague event.

[9] At the end of the war, he joined 21st Army Group as a front cameraman to film the liberation of France, Belgium and Netherlands.

Weiss refused the offer to join the US Army and become a combat cameraman in the Pacific War, because he wanted to go back to liberated Czechoslovakia.

He made his most celebrated movies in the late 1950s and 1960s, including Wolf Trap (1957), Romeo, Juliet and Darkness (1959) and Czechoslovak-British co-production Ninety Degrees in the Shade (1965).

[11] After the Warsaw Pact invasion, Weiss left Czechoslovakia and lived in West Berlin, where he taught at a film school.