TEHRAN -- Kamal Tabrizi has said that he could not believe that his close friend, filmmaker Rasul Mollaqolipur, had died.

“I was waiting for Rasul to call us, laughing, to tell us it was joke,” the director of the acclaimed film “Lizard” wrote in a letter published on the ISNA website on Wednesday.

“What a pity he didn’t call this time,” he sighed.

“Sometimes, the phone would ring and someone would tell me in an Azari accent that he was one of my relatives waiting at the bus terminal and that I should come to pick him up and take him home. For several minutes I would wonder who he was. Finally, I would realize that he was Rasul and we both laughed heartily,” he explained.

Mollaqolipur, the director of “M for Mother”, died of heart failure in the northern Iranian city of Noshahr on March 6.

However, many news sources wrongly reported on Tuesday that he died in a car accident.

Mollaqolipur’s funeral procession will begin at Tehran’s Vahdat Hall at 9 a.m. today. He will be buried in the Artists Graveyard of Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra Cemetery.

President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, Culture Minister Mohammad-Hossein Saffar Harandi, Deputy Culture Minister for Cinematic Affairs Mohammadreza Jafari-Jelveh, IRIB director Ezzatollah Zarghami, Art Bureau director Hassan Bonyanian, and several other officials sent condolence letters to Mollaqolipur’s family and the nation which were disseminated through the media.