Individual motivations and thematically-oriented film festival attendance: an empirical study based on spectators of the Artecinema international documentary festival in Naples (Italy)

Festivals represent a tool to promote a geographical area and to support cultural production thanks to their capacity to capture a specific cultural demand. Among the many types of festivals, film festivals have been gaining an increasing importance and nowadays they are exceptionally widespread. This paper aims to contribute to the recent literature that has studied the determinants of festival attendance by focusing on a case study represented by the 2015 edition of Artecinema, an international documentary film festival which takes place annually in Naples (Italy), specifically focused on documentaries dealing with art, architecture and photography. Using original survey data, our paper aims to provide an empirical analysis of motivations explaining why people attend this type of festival. The analysis is articulated in two steps. By means of a Polychoric Principal Component Analysis we firstly identify three independent latent motivations related to entertainment, love of arts, and social relations. Next, we examine the link between these motivations and intensity of attendance. Looking at the results of our regression model, the main evidence is represented by the fact that socio-economic factors do not explain the intensity of attendance, whereas latent motivations jointly with cultural consumption matter in positively explaining the intensity of attendance at the event.