We report on the realization of thin polyimide films on which phase transition vanadium dioxide (VO₂) films grow. Biased reactive sputtering achieved b-axis-oriented growth of VO₂ films on ZnO-buffered polyimide films with a thickness of 8.5  μm. By peeling off the polyimide films from a quartz substrate, stand-alone VO₂/ZnO/polyimide layered films that exhibited insulator-metal transition (IMT) with nearly three orders of resistivity change were fabricated. Dependence of IMT on a mechanical curvature was investigated for demonstrating the high flexibility. Temperature-dependent optical transmittance at 1.45  μm showed a high switching ratio for infrared light in VO₂/ZnO/polyimide layered films. The proposed structure can be utilized for active metasurfaces that control terahertz waves with quite low reflection loss due to its small thickness.