It was a painful crawl through passport control for many who arrived at Berlin Brandenberg airport today for the Berlin Film Festival and European Film Market.

Multiple professionals we spoke to said they got caught up in the slow-going throughout the day, with some waiting hours to get through and missing meetings in the process.

When I made it through after an hour’s wait (I was seated near the front of my plane and arrived to a relatively small queue) there were hundreds of people waiting behind me. At one stage in the wait, the entire ‘rest of the world’ line, including families with young children, elderly and disabled passengers, were being serviced by a solitary passport control officer.

Among those spotted in the queues were sales agents, financiers, producers, journalists, and even The Last Of Us star Bella Ramsey, who has movie Sunny Dancer debuting at the festival.

As has come to be the norm at many European airports, the ‘rest of the world’ line today moved at snails pace and was generally serviced by only a couple of officers, while the EU passenger queue was shorter and had more staff attending to it. That said, the EU queue was also backed up today.

It’s not clear why things were moving so slowly but hopefully it eases up in coming days.