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 and his wife and son. Through their individual destinies we become acquainted with the social and historical background of a bygone 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 50 years.