Tim Roth is looking to get back in the directing game with an adaptation of Marc Parent's non-fiction book, Turning Stones: My Days and Nights with Children at Risk.  Roth, who was abused as a child, sees the film as a companion piece to his 1999 directorial debut, The War Zone.  Parent was a struggling actor in his twenties who joined an experimental social work unit that called upon him to project children from abusive parents.  His work sometime required him to at times break up households and even have parents arrested.

Roth tells THR, "He was an incredible social worker – he saved tons of children from horrible situations."  Roth wants Sam Rockwell to play Parent even though Rockwell is twice Parent's age when he started the job.  The film currently has no producer, but Roth is already planning to shoot the film in digital in order to keep costs low and take "real control of the atmosphere surrounding the children."  Hit the jump for a synopsis of Turning Stones.

Here's the synopsis for Marc Parent's Turning Stones: My Days and Nights with Children at Risk:

Why does an infant die of malnutrition? Why does an eight-year-old hold a knife to his brother's throat? Or a mother push her cherished daughter twenty-three floors to her death? Marc Parent, a city caseworker, searched the streets--and his heart--for the answers, and shares them in this powerful, vivid, beautifully written book.

And here's the Publisher's Weekly review [via Amazon]:

In this outstanding work of social commentary, Parent describes the harrowing conditions he worked under and the brutalization he witnessed during the four years he was employed as a caseworker by New York City's Emergency Children's Services. His job was to respond in the night to calls made at those hours regarding children in life-threatening situations. He would then visit their homes and decide whether the children should be removed. Inadequately trained and without sufficient supervision, he and his co-workers were forced to balance dangerous situations against taking often unwilling children from their homes into tenuous foster-care arrangements. Among other horrendous encounters during his tenure, Parent dealt with an eight-year-old with venereal disease and a mother who threw her child out the window. Believing that child abuse can happen in rural as well as urban areas, Parent convincingly argues for public scrutiny of child welfare agencies as well as a societal commitment to protecting children.

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