Regarded as one of the most important Egyptian films of the 1930s and 1940s, Determination focuses on the plight of several young working-class men trying to make their way in the world amidst the squalor of an overcrowded neighborhood in Cairo. The first feature by Kamal Selim, Determination inaugurated an influential form of neorealist filmmaking that took as its subject the lives of ordinary people. It would spark some of the new directions in post-Revolution Egyptian cinema of the 1950s and 1960s.