The festival is staged across Greater Manchester – from theatres, galleries and concert halls to railway depots, churches and car parks.

The Government announced that, from 1 April 2018, they would provide Arts Council England with an additional £9 million per annum to offer revenue support to the project.

[14][15][16] Aviva Studios is next to the River Irwell, close to other city centre cultural sites, including the People's History Museum, John Rylands Library, the Opera House, HOME and the Royal Exchange Theatre.

[17] Two public squares on the north and west sides of the building also make up the Factory International site[18][19] and the scheme includes the restoration and reuse of the northern brick arched portion of the Grade II-listed Colonnaded Railway Viaduct.

Pre-Factory commissions have included Akram Khan's Giselle;[21] Thomas Ostermeier's Returning to Reims;[22] Available Light by composer John Adams, choreographer Lucinda Childs and architect Frank Gehry;[23] Everything that happened and would happen[24] by German composer and artist Heiner Goebbels; Special Edition, a series of musical offerings presented with The Warehouse Project;[25] Invisible Cities,[26] a co-commission between MIF, 59 Productions and Rambert; Ivo Van Hove's The Fountainhead;[27] Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's Atmospheric Memory;[28] and to the Moon by Laurie Anderson.

The first commission was Your Progress Will Be Saved,[31] by the artist avatar LaTurbo Avedon, in which Factory International was built in the global gaming platform Fortnite Creative.

It included Free Your Mind, an immersive Matrix films-themed dance, music and visual effects experience with a creative team including composer Michael 'Mikey J' Asante MBE and choreographer Kenrick 'H2O' Sandy MBE (founders of hip-hop dance company Boy Blue), artist and stage designer Es Devlin, playwright and poet Sabrina Mahfouz and director Danny Boyle.

In January 2019, seven local people who were not in education or employment completed a seven-month traineeship with MIF in roles such as IT, digital, production, ticketing and development.