In critical discourses on the post–Cold War world cinema, there would be no term that has become more influential than the term transnational. The phrase ‘from national to transnational’ is now considered one of the best phrases to epitomise the change in the landscape of world cinema over the past two decades. But at this moment when people began to doubt the celebratory attitude toward transnationalism in the wake of global recession, we might need to look at the phrase closely again to find if there is any missing link or any ‘vanishing mediator’ that we might have neglected between this transition from national to transnational. This paper proposes the buried term ‘postnational’ as this vanishing mediator in order to theorise how this term enables us to understand the way in which contemporary world cinemas can engage in our imagination of new communities characterised by alterity, openness, and incommensurability rather than by homogeneity, stability and exclusion. To illustrate the potential of cinema for opening up ways to imagine such postnational communities, this paper also closely examines one recent film Flight of the Red Balloon (2007) directed by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, focusing on how the aesthetics of the spectral is crucial to such an imagination. It should be noted that the film appears characterised as transnational in terms of both its contexts of production, circulation and reception, and its textual elements.