Salafism is not one thing, and the scholarship on it says so plainly. In an influential 2006 study, the political scientist Quintan Wiktorowicz divided the movement into three broad currents based on fieldwork among Jordanian Salafis, purists who reject political activism in favor of nonviolent teaching and outreach, politicos who pursue political engagement without endorsing violence, and jihadists who place armed struggle at the center of their program. Later scholars have refined and criticized parts of that typology, but its basic point, that Salafism describes a family of related positions rather than a single uniform stance, remains widely accepted.
The documentary Salafistes, filmed between 2012 and 2015 among members of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and related groups in Mali, Mauritania, Algeria, Tunisia and Iraq, documents specifically the third of those currents. Its subjects are jihadists, filmed largely without narrated commentary, describing their own beliefs and administering sharia governance in territory they controlled. What the film does not claim to show, and what this entry does not claim on its behalf, is the quietist teaching and nonviolent political engagement that, by the same academic classification, describe most adherents of the wider Salafi movement worldwide. A film about one current is not evidence about the others.