The city of Maribor  before the Second World War, and Maribor after its liberation mark the period in which the film Cafe Astoria is set. The story relates with a gentle melancholy and a slight irony the lives of  a middle-class family: the cafe 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 pre-war Maribor, divisions among the wealthy and poor, and nationally minded Slovenes  and fanatic Germanophils. 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, of course, as seen from a safe distance of fifty years.