THEY are the kind of queues we only see in Hong Kong for department store sales, or, in former, richer times, red-chip share issues.
Past the Cartier posters, the soft drinks machines, the Longchamp handbag counter and the coffee bar almost all the way out on to the pavement are hundreds of Japanese film fans.
And the film they are patiently waiting to see, at 5 pm on a Thursday afternoon is not Titanic, but L'Ecole De La Chair, one of the opening films of the 6th Yokohama French Film Festival, starring Isabelle Huppert, Vincent Lindon and newcomer Vincent Martinez.
More than 70 French film actors, directors and producers, accompanied by another 50 or so distributors and exporters descended on Yokohama last weekend to promote 18 films shown over four days.
Almost every screening was so packed that the audience overflowed into the aisles of the cinema. And after each screening, the cast presented themselves to another queue of film fans, this time clutching programmes to be signed. And in the evenings those same stars appeared once more, before a smaller, more select group of Japanese at parties.
The annual Yokohama Festival is billed as a kind of Cannes in Japan, or rather Cannes without the foreign movies and impossibly busy schedules, where Japanese buyers get the kind of red carpet treatment the French film industry thinks it deserves.
This year, as well as the Japanese guests, there were invitees from Thailand, South Korea and Taiwan at the Festival. But the two big Hong Kong foreign film distributors, Edko and Panasia, turned down invitations to attend.