Jean Fonteyne (1899–1974) was a Belgian lawyer, resistant, politician and filmmaker born in May 1899 in Ledeberg (near Ghent in East Flanders) and died on 22 June 1974.
His filmed documents are of exceptional social contribution and artistic richness in the early days of the 7th Art.
In particular, he participated in the defense of French communist deputies whose party was banned in the 1930s, of the widow of Julien Lahaut in the context of the assassination of the Seresian deputy in the 1950s, as well as of the renowned obstetrician Willy Peers imprisoned in the early 1970s for having performed voluntary terminations of pregnancy.
His parliamentary interventions published in small booklets are a moving testimony to the progressive struggles of the immediate post-war period in Belgium.
Secretary of the Vigilance Committee of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in the 1930s, Jean Fonteyne played an important role in the preparatory and contemporary advances in organized Belgian and French anti-Nazi resistance.