Director David Nichols’ third film was the culmination of his film work so far and a decade of effort. The 33-year-old managed to scrape enough money together thanks to the critical success of his previous two pictures: 2007′s “Shotgun Stories,” and last year’s award-winning “Take Shelter.”

The story of young Ellis on his search for a parental role model borrows from the sacrifice and friendship themes of Twain’s classic “Huckleberry Finn,” whose fatherless main character embarks on a Mississippi odyssey of self-discovery.

Nichols said Twain’s bittersweet tales immortalizing the “mile-wide tide” of the Mississippi river have stayed with him since he first read them when he was young. He’s frankly unapologetic about the obvious influence: “If you’re going to steal from someone, steal from someone really intelligent. And I stole from Mark Twain.”

Young actor Jacob Lofland, who played Ellis’ best friend, Neckbone, testified to Twain’s influence. Tutored on the book, Lofland recognized parts of the work in the films script. He said, only semi-jokingly, “I found out that a lot of stuff (from the novel) just wandered onto the script. We had a word with (Nichols) about that.”

McConaughey plays the eponymous character, the woebegone Mud, who is hiding on a Mississippi island from vengeful bounty hunters after shooting a man in Texas. Madly in love with Witherspoon’s unreliable, smoldering blond Juniper he enlists the support of Ellis and Neckbone to help win her love. McConaughey’s performance has wowed critics at the festival.

The Oscar-winning Witherspoon, who spent an hour in a hot, packed room with journalists despite being heavily pregnant, was born in Louisiana and took the relatively small role because it felt like home to her.

“There are very few movies about the American South that are accurate,” she said.

“Mud” — the Cannes’s official competition’s last entry — joins “Lawless” and “The Paperboy” on the list of Southern films at the festival. Nichols explained the phenomenon simply: “Well, Southerners are good story-tellers.”

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Faber — whom the Simon Wiesenthal Center last year placed at No. 3 on its list of most-wanted Nazi criminals — was convicted in 1947 of involvement in 22 murders and for aiding the Netherlands’ Nazi occupiers during World War II. He was handed a death sentence that was later commuted to life in prison, according to Dutch prosecutors.

But in 1952, he escaped and fled to Germany, where he lived in freedom.

Faber was saved by his German citizenship when German authorities rejected a request from the Netherlands last year for his extradition on a European arrest warrant. In January, Ingolstadt prosecutor Helmut Walter said he had filed a motion to have Faber serve his sentence in a German prison.

Walter said a state court in Ingolstadt wouldn’t need to reconsider any of the Dutch case but decide whether, as a result of the European arrest warrant being rejected, the sentence against him could be enforced in Germany.

Prosecutors could not be reached for comment on Saturday, the start of a three-day weekend in Germany.

Faber was born in the Netherlands on Jan. 20, 1922.

Dutch prosecutors have said he was convicted for killings at three different Dutch locations in 1944-1945, including six at the Westerbork transit camp, where thousands of Dutch Jews, including Anne Frank, were held before being sent to labor camps or death camps in eastern Europe.

According to the Wiesenthal Center, Faber volunteered for Hitler’s SS, a paramilitary organization loyal to Nazi ideology, after Germany overran the Netherlands during World War II.

He also served with the Sicherheitsdienst, the Nazi internal intelligence agency, and an SS unit code-named Silbertanne, or Silver Fir, which consisted of 15 men, most of them Dutch, who were mustered to exact reprisals for attacks by the Dutch resistance on collaborators, according to the Wiesenthal Center.

Dutch authorities first requested his extradition in 1954, but Faber had been able to get German citizenship because of his service to Germany during the war, so the request was rejected because West Germany refused to extradite its own citizens.

In 1957 a Duesseldorf court rejected attempts to bring him to trial in Germany, saying there was not enough evidence against him.

After a Dutch request to have him jailed in Germany in 2004 failed, Munich prosecutors in 2006 received new evidence from the Netherlands and looked into reopening the files. But prosecutors found that the former SS man may have been guilty not of murder but only of manslaughter — and the statute of limitations for that crime had expired.

In 2010, the Netherlands again asked for his extradition, using a new European arrest warrant. It was again rejected, because his consent was still needed to extradite him as a German citizen.

Each day is now a struggle for the women of this parched village in north Senegal to keep hungry children at bay, as they search desperately for food. Aliou’s mother can only recall one time in her life when it was worse — and that was more than 20 years ago.

“I start a fire, put a pot of water on it and tell the children I am in the middle of preparing something,” Maryam Sy, 37 and a mother of nine, says in a raspy voice. “In reality, I have nothing.”

Here are the two most alarming things about Aliou’s story: He lives in the richest country in the Sahel, and the worst is yet to come.

More than 1 million children under 5 in this wide, arid swath of Africa below the Sahara are now at risk of a food shortage so severe that it threatens their lives, UNICEF estimates. In Senegal, which is relatively stable and prosperous, malnutrition among children in the north has already surpassed 14 percent, just shy of the World Health Organization threshold for an emergency.

Hunger in this region is a lurking predator that never quite leaves, and comes back every year to pick off the weakest. Even in a non-crisis year, some 300,000 children die from lack of food across western and central Africa. All it takes is a drought and a failed harvest, and those who are now barely living on one meal a day will starve.

Since late 2011, aid groups have been sounding the alarm about how drought is once again devastating communities where children live perilously close to the edge. But not enough donations have come in.

The situation is worst in Niger, Chad and Mali, where political chaos has forced hundreds of thousands to seek refuge in places where people don’t have enough to eat themselves. But in a worrisome sign, this time the crisis also threatens 20,000 children in northern Senegal — little rag dolls with just enough energy to bury their faces in their mothers’ dresses.

“If you don’t get certain nutrients, your brain is damaged and you can never recover,” said Martin Dawes, West Africa spokesman for the U.N. children’s agency. “You are then obviously far more vulnerable to a reduction in your food bowl turning into acute and severe malnutrition.”

Already the signs of damage are there.

Aliou’s 3-year-old sister Fatimata and 8-year-old sister Kadja have orangish hair growing in at the roots — a telltale sign of the protein deficiency that comes from eating just one bowl of porridge a day. The girls are neatly dressed, but their clavicles poke through their tops like hangers.

Haby, their 4-year-old sister, has streaks of orangish-blonde hair that frame her face, almost as blonde as the Cinderella cartoon character printed on her dusty T-shirt. Her mother worriedly smooths down the wisps around her braids. She does not know the culprit is lack of protein; she wonders if it’s something in the water.

The U.N. World Food Programme serves lunch at school, but the Diallo sisters don’t go. Their parents can’t afford the school supplies.

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It’s noon in Goudoude Diobe, where women traditionally spend hours stewing the midday meal. But there is no smell of cooking vegetables or spices, no clanging of multiple pots — only the sound of roosters crowing and children crying.

Down a dusty trail, Samba Bayla’s sister-in-law is starting to cook the only meal of the day for a family of 10, usually eaten around 2 p.m. She displays a small bowl of uncooked millet and another bowl with just a few small dried fish that altogether would fit inside a pair of clasped hands.

The knobby-kneed children crowd inside a building where the water’s boiling, despite the scalding heat and heavy smoke. The midday temperatures here soar to 109 degrees Fahrenheit (43 degrees Celsius), and it’s been a month since the restless children last ate meat, at a neighbor’s wedding.

“The situation is difficult but there is nothing we can do,” says Bayla. “We tell them just a few hours more.”

It’s not supposed to be this way in Senegal, a country of more than 12 million people where sushi bars dot the seaside capital. Still, most Senegalese live in rural areas, their lives and livelihoods beholden to the right recipe of rain.

Here in the northeast region of Matam, the drought couldn’t have come at a worse time. The country is already battling high food prices. And because of the global economic downturn, fewer Senegalese in this region have family members working abroad and sending money back home.

When the rains here came late this year, they were sporadic at best. Crops failed, and the extra food stored for emergencies has been eaten. The next planting season is still months away.

Bayla grew millet and sorghum, while his wife sometimes made 1,000 francs ($2) selling incense. But grain production was down 36 percent over last year across Senegal. And those who want to buy millet after their own crops failed are paying 27 percent more compared to 2011.

“You are faced basically with households that have less of a harvest compared to what they usually have, and they are facing higher prices on the market,” said Ingeborg Maria Breuer, Senegal’s representative and country director for the U.N. World Food Programme.

On the dusty sand roads that lead to remote villages, goats stand on their hind legs to eat the only vegetation in sight — thorny acacia trees.

The lucky villagers have relatives working in the capital of Dakar, or abroad in Europe. But even work there is harder to find; a job may only last a few months, so the amount trickling back to these rural communities has decreased considerably.

In better times, there was a vegetable garden in Goudoude Diobe, with cabbage and eggplants for a community of nearly 1,300 people. Families grew enough millet, sorghum and corn to feed the village and its 250 children.

Now most here, even the breast-feeding mothers, eat only a bowl of rice once a day. If they are lucky, it is cooked with oil.

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What should have been dinnertime already has passed, and now Kadja Dembel Ba calculates that she needs to keep her children busy for at least two more hours.

Today she was lucky. She walked several hours to lug some rice back from the nearby town to her village, Fass, for her seven children.

But as she looks at her 3-year-old son Yaya Feyni, she knows it’s not enough. While other boys play outside, he lies on a bed behind his mother, listless and pale. Yaya has always been small compared to his brothers, she says, and now he is sick and won’t eat anything.

She tends to him while her 1-year-old son squirms in her lap, as her 5- and 7-year-olds hover nearby.

The family already has sold a cow to buy medicine for her husband, who is sick with a stomach ailment and cannot work. The drugs set the family back some 4,000 francs ($8) — which could have bought them 10 kilograms of rice.

The stress of finding enough food for Kadja Dembel Ba’s children seems unending. And by the time this lean season ends in a few months, there will be one more to feed, she says as she touches her pregnant belly.

On good days, the children in Fass will play with their friends until dark in the dusty village. Their stomachs, though, have not forgotten that no dinner was served.

It will be another restless night inside the family’s thatched hut. Some of the children cannot sleep, Ba says. They are just too hungry.

Back in Goudoude Diobe, the wailing toddler’s mother hopes for a few hours of peace before the night. Tomorrow, there will be no breakfast. There will be only the prayer she says every morning, asking God to help her family and her neighbors.

So far, it has not been answered.

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Krista Larson can be reached at www.twitter.com/klarsonafrica.

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Online:

Action Against Hunger: http://www.actionagainsthunger.org

U.N. World Food Programme: http://www.wfp.org

UNICEF: http://www.unicef.org