Cate Blanchett, this year’s competition jury president, and Ms. Varda took to the microphone to voice the protesters’ concerns. Ms. Varda said, “Women are not a minority in the world, and yet our industry says the opposite. We want this to change.”

In an interview as she left the red carpet, Ms. Hayek described the event as a historic moment and “an important part of the conversation.” She added that as a producer, she was already seeing change in the appetite for projects by and about women.

Asked to comment on the shortage of films by women at the festival, Ms. Hayek said, “You cannot say it’s only the fault of Cannes.” Describing it as “a complicated equation,” she added, “Not that many women are making their films because they’re not being financed or green-lit or distributed.” It was the responsibility of the “entire industry” and not just one festival, she said.

Hours before the red-carpet march, Ms. Husson said the decision by the organizers of the festival to allow the women’s march to coincide with the premiere of her movie — the story of a group of female fighters in Iraqi Kurdistan taking on ISIS — was a clever move to highlight their inclusion of a film with a mostly female cast and crew in the lineup. She described the selection of her film for the competition as “political.”

The force behind today’s march, the collective 5050 in 2020, provided statistics on its website to support the women’s assertions. These findings showed that out of a total of 2,066 directors in France who had made one or more films between 2006 and 2016, only 23 percent were women. A breakdown showed that the figure rose to 29 percent when it came to documentaries, but was only 4 percent for animation films.