The third annual New England Student Film Festival, featuring 80 original films, opens this evening in Emerson Hall. The three-day festival is co-sponsored by Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

All films entered are the work of students at colleges and universities in New England. At the close of the festival, those films judged the best by a panel of student judges will be shown in an 90-minute package which will than be rented to museums, libraries, and television stations across the country.

The student judges are representatives of the 14 New England schools which comprised the University Film Study Center (UFSC), the other co-sponsor of the festival.

Terry Kemper, director of special projects for the UFSC, which is based at Brandeis University, said yesterday that the festival is "basically non-competitive." The films are chosen to become part of the touring festival in order to earn some money for the student film-makers, his said.

"There is no one who distributes student-made films," Kemper said. "We rest the films for them."

He said that the festival provides "a chance for the public at large to see student films."

Tremendous Range

"We've attracted a tremendous range of films," Kemper commented, citing films varying from abstract and poetic pieces to documentaries.

"What you find more than anything else is that the films reflect the schools where they were made," he said.

Entries from Harvard students include "The Communique Did Not Make Clear Whether the Shooting Was Absolutely Necessary" by Ronald Kauffman '75' "The Circles They Moved in" by Rick Rosenthall '71, and "Arabesque" by Theodore Spagna, a special student last year.