The city of Maribor before the Second World War, and Maribor after its liberation is marked by the period in which the film Cafe Astoria is set. With a gentle melancholy and a slight irony, the film relates to the lives of a middle-class family: the café owner, his wife and their son. Through their individual destinies we become acquainted with the social and historical background of a by-gone era; the social and national differences of prewar Maribor, divisions among the wealthy and poor, nationally minded Slovenes and fanatic Germanophiles. The first year after the war introduced the absurd characteristic cruel measures of the so-called revolutionary social transformations in which calamity and coincidence intervene, resulting in events of comic nature as seen from safe distance of fifty years.