This is a prominent film of Czechoslovakia’s "New Wave", the extraordinary burst of cinematic creativity that began with the relaxation of the Communist regime’s cultural controls around 1963 and continued until (or even after) the Soviet Union imposed much more restrictive policies on the country by an invasion in August 1968. Jasný (b. 1925) was a highly respected precursor and sponsor of this movement as well as an active participant – "the spiritual father of the Czech New Wave," according to Miloš Forman.

Few of the films of the Czech New Wave were overtly political, though many contained oblique criticism of the political and social system. This film, completed during the heady months of the "Prague Spring" in 1968 and released just before the Warsaw Pact invasion in August, offers some very direct political criticism, particularly of the process of collectivizing agriculture. After the 1968 invasion it was promptly banned, and Jasný quickly emigrated to Austria. The government announced in 1973 that All My Good Countrymen (along with three other New Wave films) was never to be shown again in Czechoslovakia.

This is not to say that the film is a bitter political polemic. Here, as with many Czech artists in the 1960s (see Kundera), there is an overall tone of disillusionment with a system that once looked so promising. The picture of how collectivization was accomplished in the countryside is unsparingly negative. But on the whole the tone of the film is elegiac rather than harsh. For all the sad things it has to relate, the film is often celebratory – of the beauty of the Moravian countryside, and of friendship. The many-sidedness of the film’s purposes is underlined by the lyrical nature photography that introduces the film’s sequences, by the recurrent rural images of the white horse and of scything, and by the large role that music plays in the film.

The story of the film is structured in an unusual way, but it is not hard to follow. It is set in the years when the people of Czechoslovakia were learning to live in the post-war world under Communist rule. It tells the story of seven friends in a Moravian village, initially without particular emphasis on any one of them; only later does it turn mainly into the story of František, the resister. The story is told in discrete sequences, with the month (or season) and year given for each, and lyrical nature photography to underline the time of year. Opening in May 1945 (the end of World War II), the story jumps to a sequence set in March 1948 (just after the Communist seizure of power in Prague), then to 1951, and so on up to 1957. There is also an undated epilogue that may be meant to be the film’s "today", 1968.