CANNES - First-time director Abu Bakr Shawky said that piecing together financing for a feel-good road movie about an Egyptian leper and his orphan friend nicknamed Obama was the least of his troubles getting his film to Cannes.

The newcomer is going toe-to-toe with Spike Lee, his former professor, and Jean-Luc Godard for the coveted Palme d'Or at the world's premier film festival with his debut feature "Yomeddine".

The touching, upbeat picture tells the story of Beshay, who lives in a leper colony north of Cairo, and Obama, who joins him on a cross-country trek after he escapes his overcrowded orphanage.

"It's my first film so obviously I didn't have any record to fall back when I go to financiers but also I had non-actors who weren't able to read and the main actor also had leprosy," said the Egyptian-Austrian director, who at 32 is the youngest in the competition.

Shawky found his lead actor Rady Gamal at the Abu Zaabal Leper Colony, where he made a short documentary in 2008, and said he was taken with the natural charisma behind his heavily scarred face and disfigured limbs.

"When you live in a secluded leper colony, you're not used to people staring at you all the time and now you have to stand in front of a camera and have 60 people (on the crew) staring at you all day," he said.

"But by the end of the shoot he was the star - everybody loved him, he cracks jokes all the time."

Shawky said advances in treatment of leprosy meant its devastating effects may make his film a historical relic in just a few decades.

"The older generation (such as Gamal) that contracted the disease before they came up with a cure for it in the 1980s are basically the last of their kind," he said.

As for the Nubian boy nicknamed Obama, Shawky said he didn't aim to get into US politics but rather show the global reach of cultural touchstones.

"There's a scene when they're on Garbage Mountain (a local trash dump) and they see a Newsweek magazine. Pop culture is so pervasive - it's a magazine that was printed in the United States and it ends up on a garbage heap in Egypt," he said.

"I think a lot of people take it for granted how much these popular things affect people on the other side of the world, so you can have a kid named Obama in Egypt."

Tragically, Shawky said, European visa problems kept both actors from being able to have their moment in the Cannes limelight, where the film was greeted with a standing ovation.

Shawky and his producer-wife Dina Emam ended up turning to crowdfunding to scrape together the film's shoestring budget, and the example of mentors including Lee, who will screen his latest picture "BlacKkKlansman" in competition next week.

"I talked to him about this film when it was still just an idea," Shawky said of the veteran filmmaker who taught him at New York University. - AFP