Today we’d like to introduce you to Joshua Ashy Holden.
Hi Joshua , we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
My brother Nick and I moved to Austin from Lafayette, Louisiana, when we were young and pretty quickly found ourselves pulled into the creative community here. Our uncle, Steven Bruton, was a musician and actor in Austin, and through him we got our first glimpse of what it looked like to actually build a life around making art.
We started acting in Austin indie films, playing in bands, writing, and basically saying yes to anything creative we could get our hands on. I eventually studied Radio-Television-Film at UT, while Nick studied Philosophy at St. Edward’s. After college, we started our own production company.
At the beginning, the idea was pretty simple: we would make documentaries and other films for clients and try to support ourselves while continuing to write and make our own movies.
That experiment has now lasted more than 15 years.
In that time, we’ve worked with all kinds of interesting people and organizations, but we never stopped writing. Between the two of us, we’ve written more than a dozen screenplays while slowly figuring out how we could write films we could actually make. In turn, all that writing has made us better at our client work, helping people find the story in what they do and figuring out how to tell it in a way that feels honest and engaging.
Our second narrative feature, Sell Out, premiered at the Austin Film Festival and went on to win Best Narrative Feature at the Lone Star Film Festival. We’re now preparing to release the film while developing an ambitious three-film slate that we hope will take everything we’ve learned over the last 15 years into the next chapter of our careers.
It has definitely been the long way around, but I think that’s also become a big part of our story. We started the production company as a way to support our art, but somewhere along the way we realized that learning the business side was making us better artists too. It taught us how to collaborate, communicate, manage money, build relationships, and actually get things made…all the things we didn’t realize were just as important to becoming sustainable, successful artists as learning the craft itself.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
One of the hardest parts of pursuing something creative is that nobody can really tell you when persistence is admirable and when you’re just being stubborn.
We’ve spent an enormous amount of our time, money and energy making films while building a business alongside that dream. We’ve had to learn how to budget our time and money carefully and keep our film goals in sight whether the company was doing great or going through a slower period.
There have definitely been moments when we’ve wondered whether we should just do something else, but we’ve always kept writing and making things anyway. Maybe that’s why, when we were younger, we named our company Mishnoon. It’s an endearing Arabic term for someone who’s a little crazy and passionate, which in retrospect feels pretty appropriate.
What’s exciting now is that after more than 15 years, it feels like some of those seeds are finally starting to grow. We’re getting our films made, collaborating with people we’ve wanted to work with for years, and seeing opportunities that simply weren’t there when we started.
I don’t think we’ve “made it” by any stretch. But we’ve stayed in the game long enough to finally see what might be possible. I think one of the beautiful things about being human is our ability to dream and imagine a life that doesn’t exist yet. For us, that dream has always been a collective pursuit, and regardless of where it leads, the pursuit itself has enriched our lives, deepened our relationships, and given us a reason to keep growing and creating.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
At the center of everything we do is story.
Nick and I are writers, directors, actors and filmmakers, and we’ve also run our production company for more than 15 years. Whether we’re making one of our own narrative films or working with a client, we’re usually most interested in the same things: character, performance, emotion and finding the human story underneath everything.
We’re probably a little old-fashioned in that way. We love actors. We love great writing. We love movies. And we still believe audiences respond when something feels genuinely human rather than manufactured.
With our own films, we’re especially interested in flawed people trying to navigate complicated situations, usually with some humor mixed in.We want to make entertaining movies, but we also hope they start conversations. We don’t necessarily think films need to provide answers. For us, storytelling is a way of asking questions, exploring different perspectives, and hopefully getting a little closer to something true.
Our community in Austin has certainly become a huge part of that voice.
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
We really love collaborating with people and are always looking to grow our community of like-minded artists, filmmakers and business people. On the client side, we’re especially excited about opportunities to bring more of what we love about narrative filmmaking into the commercial world and developing original concepts, writing scripts, working with actors, and creating cinematic, story-driven films for brands and organizations. We’re always excited to meet interesting people, find new stories to tell, or help someone figure out how to tell their own story in a meaningful way.
Also stay tuned for Sell Out! We’re currently aiming for a November or December 2026 release, and we’re hoping to bring the film back home for a theatrical run or special screening at Violet Crown or another local Austin theater in early 2027.
Austin has been such an important part of our story and of this film in itself, so getting to share it with people here would be a pretty special way to bring this chapter full circle.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mishnoon.com
- Instagram: thebrothersholden
